We're excited to announce our latest release for SolarWinds Service Desk. This update is packed with new features and enhancements focused on three key themes: strengthening your incident escalation process, refining the agent assignment workflow, and giving you more granular control over your platform’s security.
Let's dive into what's new!
Strengthen Incident Escalation with Squadcast Integration
In today's fast-paced IT environments, ensuring the right person is alerted at the right time is critical to resolving major incidents. To help you streamline this process, we are thrilled to introduce our new integration with Squadcast, a leading incident response platform and a member of the SolarWinds product family.
With this new integration, you can:
- Automatically Create Squadcast Alerts: You can now configure your Service Desk automation rules to automatically create a new alert in Squadcast when a ticket meets your specified criteria.
- Send Rich Data: The integration automatically passes the ticket title, description, and all system and custom fields to the Squadcast alert, ensuring your on-call team has all the context they need.
- Resolve Alerts Automatically: Keep your systems in sync. When an incident is resolved within Service Desk, a corresponding automation rule can now automatically resolve the associated alert in Squadcast, reducing manual effort for your teams.
- Streamline Incident Response: By escalating tickets directly to your on-call schedules in Squadcast, you can ensure critical issues are actioned immediately, reducing downtime and improving resolution times.
This feature is now available to be enabled via Labs. This new integration is a key part of our future broader goal: to connect the entire flow from monitoring and alerting to incident response and final resolution. To learn more about the Squadcast integration, see Setup Labs.
Streamline Agent Workflows with Group Assignment Enhancements
As we previewed in our last update, we're releasing a full set of enhancements for group assignments based on your valuable feedback. These changes are designed to improve the agent experience and provide greater administrative control.
This update includes:
- A More Intuitive Assignment Workflow: We've re-ordered the assignment fields, placing 'Group' before 'Assignee'. This creates a more logical flow for routing tickets first to a team and then to an individual.
- Filtered Assignee Lists: To make assignments even easier, you now have the ability to filter the 'Assignee' dropdown to show only agents who are members of the selected group. This dramatically speeds up finding the right person for the job in large organizations.
- Full Admin Control: We understand that not every organization uses group assignments. You now have full control to disable the group assignment feature entirely across your instance if it doesn't match your team's workflow.
- Reduced Notification Noise: We've tackled notification fatigue in two key ways:
- De-duplication: Agents who are both the Assignee and in the Assigned Group will no longer receive duplicate notifications.
- Granular Controls: We've added new toggles for group assignment notifications, giving you control over when and why group members are alerted.
- Easily Manage Disabled Groups: You can now easily filter by "Enabled" status in your Groups setup. This allows you to find, manage, and re-enable previously disabled groups, simplifying your group lifecycle management.
To learn more about the enhancements to group assignments, see Groups Setup
New Security Controls with File Upload Restrictions
Security is a top priority. To help you protect your instance from malicious content, we are introducing a new security setting to control file attachments.
This feature gives administrators direct control over which file types can be uploaded to Service Desk, preventing users from attaching potentially harmful executable files, scripts, or other malware.
Administrators can now define a specific "allow-list" of file extensions (e.g., .png, .jpg, .pdf, .txt, .docx). This list is fully customizable, allowing you to select from common file types or add any other specific extensions your organization uses.
Once this feature is configured, any attempt to upload a file type that is not on your allow-list will be blocked, providing a powerful new layer of security for your service desk. To read more about file upload restrictions, see Attachment Settings.
Other notable enhancements
- Support making checkbox mandatory
We're excited for you to explore these new features. For a detailed guide on how to configure and use everything in this update, please check out the full release notes.
Office Hours Reminder: Do you have more questions about your Service Desk setup or anything regarding Enterprise Service Management (ESM)? You can join us for any of our upcoming office hours and get all your queries and questions answered. View and book your slot using one of the links below:
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
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