Our latest SolarWinds Service Desk update is designed to empower ITSM teams to refine daily execution with more precision and improved communication clarity. This release delivers critical enhancements for managing data integrity, tightening security around approvals, and providing visual context for complex processes—all built to scale alongside your team's evolving needs.
Strengthen Security with Approval Compliance
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: General Availability
Who says "yes" matters just as much as the approval itself. To further align with high-integrity compliance standards, this update ensures that actions are strictly tied to the designated individual. If an approval or task notification is shared, the system now validates that the person taking action is the specific approver or owner listed in the request. Furthermore, to maintain these high standards, users will now be prompted to authenticate if they are not already logged in when clicking an action link.
Unauthorized users who attempt to take action via email will now land on a secure page explaining they are not the designated user for that request. As a major quality-of-life bonus, this update also helps prevent "spam checkers" and email filters (like Microsoft Safe Links or Barracuda) from accidentally clicking links and unintentionally approving requests or completing tasks on your behalf. To learn more, visit Global Settings: Approvals and Tasks.
Granular Control for Reopening Incidents
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: General Availability
We’re happy to be releasing an update for one of our top community requests; splitting the configuration for Closed and Resolved statuses to give you better control over ticket reopens. Previously, the ability for an end-user to reopen a ticket via email was an "all or nothing" setting.
We have now split this configuration into two distinct toggles, allowing administrators to enable reopens for Resolved incidents while keeping Closed incidents firmly locked. This helps ensure your reporting stays accurate and aligned with ITIL best practices by preventing "zombie tickets" from being reopened months later, removing the need for manual automation workarounds to keep closed tickets closed. For more information, visit Global Settings: Reopen Resolved Incidents and Reopen Closed Incidents.
Empathy at Scale with AI Tone Enhancement
Plan Type: Premier | Status: Labs
Our latest SolarWinds AI update acts as an empathy-powered sidekick for your agents. With the new Tone Enhancement tool, agents can polish their ticket replies with a single click. The AI can take brief shorthand notes, like "send logs," and elaborate them into professional, friendly, or empathetic responses. This helps foster positive, friendly relationships between IT and requesters by ensuring every communication is thoughtful and clear, all without adding extra manual work for the technician addressing the issue.
Crucially, the AI is built to be fact-safe, ensuring that ticket IDs, URLs, dates, and error codes are preserved exactly as written while only the tone is refined. This feature is launching in Labs and requires administrators to enable it in both the Labs settings and the Global Gen AI settings to ensure full control over access. For more about this feature, see Labs: Use GenAI in comments.
Visualize the Logic with Graphical Workflows
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: Labs
To help you understand complex logic without scrolling through dense text (especially great for the visual learners out there!), we are introducing Graphical Workflows for runbooks and service catalogs. While the traditional textual view is great for sequential steps, the new visual view presents workflows like a flow chart, making branching logic easier to digest at a glance.
In this initial release, the graphical view is read-only and available on both the design side and within active tickets. While you can reposition nodes to highlight specific paths, you will still utilize the textual tab to make edits or add new nodes. While we are still working through the technical complexities required to allow users to collapse and expand specific branches, this foundation provides the essential visibility needed to audit and understand long, complex processes. You can find this new visualization tool now in Service Desk Labs. To learn more visit Labs: See a visual representation of a process workflow.
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.
Final Thoughts
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. For more updates, visit our What We’re Working On (WWWO) post.
Have a feature request? Upvote or submit your request here.
P.S. If you missed the latest Q1 2026 Quarterly Product Update, you can now watch the replay in the SolarWinds Academy.
