We are thrilled to announce our latest release for SolarWinds Service Desk, centered around two core pillars: intelligent automation through Generative AI (GenAI) and flexible process control. These enhancements are designed to shift your focus from manual effort to strategic resolution, helping to ensure your teams save time, increase visibility, and deliver superior service.
Intelligent Problem Management with GenAI – Increase Visibility, Eliminate Waste
Imagine a help desk where every agent, regardless of experience, can instantly spot a widespread issue and begin solving it at the root cause, not just treating the symptoms. This release makes that possible with our new enhanced problem correlation capabilities, powered by GenAI.
This suite of features turns your incident data into actionable intelligence, saving your agents valuable time and ensuring no recurring issue slips through the cracks.
Proactively Connecting Incidents to the Problem Root Cause
We've injected AI-powered suggestions right into your Incident and Problem modules to stop you from wasting time on repeated resolutions, helping streamline support, and updating customers across the problem without additional, unnecessary work:
- Saving Time with Proactive Problem Creation: When a new ticket lands, GenAI doesn't just look at the current one—it scans for similar, unresolved incidents. If a pattern is detected, the agent receives an immediate, intuitive prompt to create a new problem record, with a review step to allow them to review the suggested incidents. The problem ticket is then automatically populated with details and all related incidents, eliminating the manual steps of searching, creating, and linking. This is how we shift from reactive fire-fighting to proactive problem solving.
- Instant Linking to Existing Investigations: If an existing problem investigation is already underway, GenAI recognizes the connection and provides an instant suggestion to link the new incident to that problem. This prevents redundant diagnostics, keeps all customer reports consolidated under one primary record, and ensures a single source of truth for resolution.
- Ensuring Comprehensive Incident Tracking: The intelligence works both ways. When a Problem Manager is actively working on a problem ticket, GenAI proactively suggests other open incidents that share common attributes. This dramatically increases visibility over the full scope of the issue, guaranteeing that every affected customer is accounted for and nobody is left waiting.
- Deeper Knowledge Reuse with Closed Problems: To further enhance resolution speed, we are expanding our suggested solutions scope. GenAI will now include closed problems as potential sources for solutions and reference, giving your team access to the root cause analysis and final resolution details from every past issue to be surfaced in the suggested solutions. This institutional knowledge vastly accelerates incident resolution and improves accuracy of the suggestion.
By leveraging GenAI to automatically spot patterns and connect related items, your team gains a level of visibility previously impossible without extensive manual effort. This saves time, improves data quality, and enables faster, root-cause resolution, leading directly to enhanced customer satisfaction.
GenAI Enhanced Problem Correlation features will intially be released in Labs. To learn more, see Gen AI.
GenAI Pro-Tip: Remember that GenAI is trained on your data. Ensuring your agents are consistently using best practices—thoroughly filling out ticket fields, providing clear descriptions, and writing comprehensive resolutions—will directly improve the quality and accuracy of the suggestions GenAI provides.
Phase 1 of Custom Field Types – Ensuring Data Accuracy
Clean data is the foundation of efficient service delivery, powerful reporting, and seamless automation. While standard text fields are flexible, they often led to messy, inconsistent data when users input information that should have been in a specific format, such as a contact number or an email.
This release introduces Phase 1 of Custom Field Types, adding dedicated email and number fields. This is a crucial step on our journey to provide comprehensive field validation, ensuring the data you collect is exactly the data you need. The new field types automatically enforce the correct structure, drastically reducing the mess of bad data in your records and improving the user experience by guiding input. For number fields, you can define limits and decimal precision to ensure realistic values, and for email fields, the system confirms the basic format is correct and makes the validated address a clickable link for faster communication. It’s important to note that while the system will confirm emails are in the right format, it will not validate the email itself.
We look forward to introducing more field validation types in the future, helping ensure the data you have is the data you need. To learn more about phase 1, see Custom Fields.
Enhanced Control and Flexibility in Process Automation
To keep pace with the increasing complexity of enterprise IT, we are focused on providing both control and flexibility in integrating SolarWinds Service Desk with your broader tool ecosystem.
Dynamic Variable Replacement in Process Integration URLs
Automation is most effective when it's contextual. We are now allowing you to use replacement variables directly within the URL/path of your Process Integrations, enabling true dynamic integration calls.
This is a game-changer for workflows that require a specific identifier in the API path—think about common tasks like using a change workflow to delete a specific user from an external system like Azure AD (Entra ID), where the user ID must be part of the URL.
Now, you can simply insert variables like {{userPrincipalName}} into the URL. During the workflow execution, the system will dynamically replace that placeholder with the correct, latest value from the change record or process variables. This capability dramatically increases the automation potential of your workflows for complex processes like employee onboarding, offboarding, and dynamic permission management.
To learn more, see Process Integrations.
Important Note on Process Control
To maintain the stability and reliability of your automated workflows, we have introduced the ability to Enable or Disable Process Integrations. This ensures only those integrations that have been fully configured and tested are available for use in your production automations (Service Catalog Items or Runbooks). To protect your live environments, if you attempt to disable an integration that is currently being used, the system will provide a clear error message, including a clickable list of all referencing items, allowing you to easily manage dependencies. New integrations will default to a Disabled state, encouraging a test-first approach. For more, see Process Integrations.
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? 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. Have a feature request? Upvote or submit your request here.
