Our latest SolarWinds Service Desk update is designed to empower ITSM teams to reduce manual overhead and innovate safely. This release delivers critical enhancements for managing data integrity and workflow execution across your organization. From the highly anticipated launch of Sandbox to the expansion of automations that impact resolution times, these features are built to scale alongside your team's evolving needs.
Secure Innovation with Sandbox
Plan Type: Premier | Status: General Availability
The wait for a dedicated testing environment is over as Sandbox Phase 1 officially moves to General Availability. Premier customers can now create a siloed environment that mirrors their production account—bringing over groups, users, custom fields, service catalog items, and more. This allows administrators to test new configurations or toggle on features safely before a full production rollout. Simply create your new Sandbox and the system sends an automated email once your new environment is ready to use. To learn more about this Sandbox release, see Sandbox.
While Phase 1 focuses on environment setup and manual testing, bidirectional sync back functionality as part of Phase 2 is currently in development.
Scale Efficiency with Automated Runbook Attachment
Plan Type: Advanced & Premier | Status: General Availability
Automations can now automatically attach a runbook to an incident based on your predefined conditions, such as category or subcategory changes. This ensures standard operating procedures are immediately available to agents, with automations to replace, add, or remove runbooks as the ticket context evolves. By removing the need for manual attachments, your team can maintain consistency and speed in their troubleshooting processes.
If a runbook has no mandatory fields, it can start automatically upon attachment, enabling powerful auto-resolution use cases like restarting a database or gathering diagnostic data before an agent intervenes. This moves teams toward faster resolution by automating the diagnostic and remediation steps that would otherwise wait for an agent to begin them. For more information, see Create an Automation Rule.
Note: Advanced customers will now have limited access to the Runbooks feature. Learn more at the bottom of this post.
Personalize Workflows via Enhanced Automation Variables
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: General Availability
We are extending variable support across the platform, moving beyond process integrations to include runbooks, automation rules, and general workflows. The "add variables" picker UI is now available for actions like "Send Notification," "Update Record," and "Add Tag," helping ensure your automated updates are accurate and data-driven. This allows you to scale your workflows without losing the specific context required for high-quality service.
This enhancement also allows for more personalized communications by automatically inserting context-specific data directly into email subjects, bodies, and record fields. This release is the first in a series of deeper variable enhancements, as we continue to build more granular mapping capabilities for the platform in future updates. To learn more, see Process Workflows.
Protect Integrity with New Custom Field Dependency Checks
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: General Availability
To prevent accidental workflow disruptions, the system now performs a validation check before you delete or disable a custom field. If a field is currently in use within a custom form, service catalog, runbook, or process integration, the application will display a list of these active dependencies. This ensures that administrators have a clear map of how their data is connected before making changes.
The system will block the deletion until the field reference is removed from these entities, protecting your active processes from inadvertent data loss. This feature is part of our ongoing focus to ensure that modifications to system configurations do not negatively impact your critical business workflows. For more about this feature, see Custom Fields.
Precision Asset Mapping with Flexible Intune Field Matching
Plan Type: Advanced & Premier | Status: General Availability
Our Intune integration now offers greater flexibility for organizations with unique identity management configurations. Administrators can choose whether to match users in SolarWinds Service Desk via their email address or their User Principal Name (UPN) to automatically populate asset owners. Existing Intune customers will see UPN selected by default and are unaffected unless they choose to make a change. This choice allows larger customers with more complex Entra ID setups to maintain accurate records without manual intervention. To learn more, visit Intune Configuration.
More Value on Advanced: Expanded Access to Runbooks and AI-Generated Resolution Summaries
Plan Type: Advanced | Status: General Availability
As part of our ongoing investment in the Advanced plan, we're introducing limited access to two capabilities previously exclusive to Premier.
Advanced plan customers can now explore Runbooks (up to 3 per account) and AI-Generated Resolution Summaries (up to 250 per month), bringing generative AI to Advanced for the first time, alongside a meaningful way to experience intelligent automation in practice.
For teams looking to unlock unlimited runbooks, the full GenAI suite, Sandbox, and more, Premier remains the complete automation experience. For more information, please reach out to your account manager or visit GenAI Settings.
Other notable enhancements
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:
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