Hello everyone and thank you for your patience as we rallied the team to answer the questions you posed during our 23Q2 quarterly product update for customers. Please be on the lookout in your emails for the next one, which we should be holding sometime in August or September.
We've grouped these questions into a few common categories, listed the questions we received, and our answers to those below. As always, comment on this post if you have any more questions for us on the Product Management team. Contact your SolarWinds representative or let us know if you want to schedule a one-on-one discussion.
QUESTIONS and ANSWERS
Was the session recorded, and can I watch it?
Unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of the webcast, we have not made it available for replay. We hope to see you at our next one, though!
This post contains forward-looking statements regarding future product plans and development efforts. SolarWinds considers various features and functionality prior to any final generally available release. Information in this presentation regarding future features and functionality is not and should not be interpreted as a commitment from SolarWinds that it will deliver any specific feature or functionality in the future or, if it delivers such feature or functionality, any time frame when that feature or functionality will be delivered. All information is based upon current product interests, and product plans and priorities can change at any time. SolarWinds undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements regarding future product plans and development efforts if product plans or priorities change.
Virtual Agent
- Can we use a third-party virtual agent instead of the SWSD virtual agent?
- What's the difference between Advanced & Premier plans for Virtual Agent?
- Can we modify any of the Virtual Agent options?
- What does the Virtual Agent add to the Teams or Slack integration?
We wanted to offer our Virtual Agent feature to as many people as possible. The Advanced plan contains a standard virtual agent branded by SolarWinds. The Premier plan will potentially include in the future more advanced customization options such as branding and the ability to configure the virtual agent’s behavior. The Teams & Slack integration for Virtual Agent adds the following capabilities: suggestions on resolving issues, a direct search of the knowledge base, and the ability to request a new service. We'll keep enhancing the Virtual Agent functionality to add value to the MS Teams and Slack channels.
Today we don't support the ability to integrate a 3rd party virtual agent, so if this is a high priority request among many customers, we encourage you to submit a feature request and please let us know.
Runbooks
- Will Runbooks be made available in the Advanced plan?
- Are Runbooks similar to custom forms?
- Are Runbook deletions captured in the Audit tab?
We're excited to see what customers do with our new Runbooks capabilities. Runbooks are only available in our Premier tier, with currently no plans to include them in other tiers. Runbooks differ from Custom Forms, which collect end-user information as part of an incident or service request. Runbooks guide your agents through a pre-defined list of tasks and/or approvals, taking your standard operating procedures (SOPs) and implementing them in a more automated process directly in Service Desk. Runbooks are excellent for critical incident resolution tasks, like restoring data from a backup or restarting a server, ensuring mistake-free incident resolution. Once a Runbook is attached to an incident and started by an agent, you can stop, restart, and delete the runbook at any time, which the audit log captures.
Core Service Desk
- Are there any plans for Service Requests and Incidents to have their own categories?
- Can we give a requestor "Read Only" access to Service Desk areas?
- Could the Solutions page support video tutorials for problem-solving basic issues?
- Can we have additional interaction options with custom fields for catalog forms?
- Are you working on including templates for incident responses?
- Is redaction in the pipeline?
- Are any changes coming to search?
- Can I create a service request without triggering an SLA?
- Any plans to allow us to auto-track time on tickets?
- Can automation rules insert pre-defined comments on an incident?
We received several questions asking about roadmap items and whether we have plans to change or add functionalities to the product. We're happy to see this level of engagement and enthusiasm about the future of Service Desk, and we're always working to build the best product for you. As a quick reminder, visit our Feature Request page to submit feature requests and upvote your favorite ones, and join us on our What We're Working On page to see what items are top of mind for us right now.
The following items from the above questions are on our radar for improvement: category enhancements, custom ticket types, custom field enhancements, export improvements, incident response templates, search, automation for SLAs, and record-level permissions. We've included some more information on these below. Of the questions above, time tracking and pre-defined comment insertion are not on our roadmap, so please submit or upvote these requests on the feature request page.
We're interested in adding more license types to Service Desk, which could include a Read Only seat. The rich text editor in Solutions allows you to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and Microsoft Stream, which should help with wanting to have quick how-to videos in your knowledge base.
We have two future enhancements for categories to give more access to the platform's built-in data model for objects and fields and the ability to create custom ticket types. We're also looking into enhancements for custom fields, including adding/modifying inputs after service request submissions. We know there are some limitations with the export format, so we're also looking into this area. Support for incident response templates and canned responses is also on our roadmap. Search is always an area we're looking to improve the accuracy of, especially for the top results shown. The SLA rules determine whether an SLA applies or not. Our roadmap plans include automation rules for SLA management, giving you more flexibility. For those with robust Data Privacy requirements, we're working towards giving you the ability to have record-level permissions in the future, to protect sensitive information. Our longer-term roadmap will explore leveraging AI to detect and potentially auto-mask sensitive data like PHI, PII, PCI, etc.
Automatically tracking agent time per ticket is not on the roadmap. The main challenge is that agents might be working on multiple things, and there is no automatic way of detecting which ticket an agent is working on. Our future automation enhancements should allow you to use automation rules to achieve this goal. If automating this is important to your organization, we recommend you vote for this feature on THWACK or open a new feature request if one does not exist. We currently do not have the option to insert pre-defined comments with automation rules. We will consider adding this requirement to the roadmap.
Integrations
- How does Service Desk integrate with SolarWinds Observability products?
- We saw a bug with MS Teams where the category section showed category and subcategory values. Will this be fixed?
- When opening tickets with the virtual agent, can you use the built-in Custom Forms?
The Hybrid Cloud Observability/Service Desk integration currently covers the following areas:
- Create incidents from alerts with a bi-directional sync
- Import Hybrid Cloud Observability assets into Service Desk
- Import asset dependencies from Hybrid Cloud Observability's NPM
- Auto-attach assets to tickets based on their Hybrid Cloud Observability node id
You can read more about the integration here.
For the MS Teams & Slack questions above, requesters will be redirected to the self-service portal due to MS Teams & Slack not providing API support to enable dynamic forms. Lastly, the MS Teams bug mentioned above was fixed.
Asset Management
- Any updates with Scanning Assets?
- Is there a plan to add a reporting option for the CMDB through the Power BI connector?
- Will you develop the ability to add custom status to assets?
- Does the asset scan allow all the software on the asset to be pulled?
- Any roadmap item for improved inventory management?
Continuing to enhance our Asset Management capabilities is a significant area of focus for us since the relationship between assets and incidents is critical to our mission to bring Observability and ITSM closer together.
We have released many enhancements to our asset management, including Intune support, asset automation, and our new Linux agent. We are continuing to work on more improvements in this area, including the use of a specific IP address range rather than subnets, discovery agent MSI wrapper, JAMF coverage of mobile devices, custom statuses for assets, aligning asset data model to the CMDB for hierarchy and inheritance, ability to partially receive ordered items, and advanced automation options for assets. We also plan to add additional reporting and analysis options to include more built-in asset & CMDB reports while making asset data available through our Power BI connector.
Our discovery capabilities allow assets and their software to be pulled into Service Desk using the discovery agent for Windows, Mac, or Linux and the discovery scanner with SCCM or JAMF connectors.
Beyond IT
- Will other departments be isolated from each other?
- Can one use a service desk for warehouse management as well?
- Which tiers will Enterprise Service Management be available in?
- Will ESM enable cross-instance automation of passing incidents from one team to another?
- We use multiple instances of Service Desk for different departments already today. How will we migrate to this new ESM feature having multiple separate departments under one instance? Is this something SolarWinds will help to implement?
We're almost ready to share more about our upcoming Enterprise Service Management (ESM) capability, so keep checking THWACK for that announcement. We'll provide some commentary here for now. We're excited to help you take Service Desk beyond IT this year. As we're wrapping up development and entering into Beta, some of these answers are subject to change.
The current plan is to release ESM in our Advanced and Premier plans. ESM will allow IT teams to provide other Non-IT departments a separate instance of Service Desk to gain many of the same benefits your teams have gained (request forms, a self-service portal, knowledge bases, ticket tracking, etc.). Each department's data will be isolated from each other's, with the ability to control who can access each service desk's configuration and data. The ability to send tickets from one service desk to another when under the same tenant will not be available on the initial release but is part of our phase 2 plans for ESM. And for those already using multiple instances of Service Desk, we're evaluating ways to make data migration possible from multiple tenants to a single tenant with multiple Service Desks under them. Keep an eye on THWACK, where we will post an update when we have additional information.
Thank you so much to all of you that joined us on our 23Q2 quarterly customer product update, we are really looking forward to seeing you all at our next one. Please be on the lookout for the email invitation, we’re likely going to have our next one in either August or September for a Q3 recap and Q4 preview.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
See what else we're working on.
Have a feature request? Upvote or submit your request here.
