We’re excited to announce the May 12th update for SolarWinds Service Desk. Whether you’re building more professional, departmentalized forms, fine-tuning SLA targeting, or giving your users the power to control exactly how they stay informed via notifications—this update is designed to reduce friction and raise the bar on experience. Here is a look at what’s landing in Service Desk today.
Organize Complex Forms with Drag-and-Drop Form Separators and Section Titles
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: Labs
Large forms with many fields can often appear confusing and disorganized, which can lead to users missing critical fields or providing incorrect data. To help you design better intake experiences, we have introduced draggable layout elements that allow you to create a clear visual hierarchy. You can now add title areas, visual separators, or a combination of both directly into your form definitions. These elements take up the full width of the form, rather than being confined to a single column, ensuring proper alignment and a cleaner layout even for complex Change or Catalog forms.
These separators are fully movable via drag-and-drop, and you can add multiple separators, each with an optional section title of up to 200 characters. These enhancements are available across Custom Forms, Runbooks, Service Catalog, and Change Management, ensuring that whether a user is creating an incident from the portal or a technician is following a Runbook, the flow of information is logical. By breaking up dense forms into distinct sections, you can significantly reduce form fatigue for your end-users. To learn more visit Setup: Labs.
Give Every Field Label the Space It Needs with Longer Custom Field Labels
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: Labs
Rolling out ESM beyond IT means building forms for departments with very different needs (e.g. HR intake questions, facilities requests, complex custom surveys) where full-length, descriptive field labels aren’t a nice-to-have, they’re essential for getting accurate data. If you have ever had a critical HR question cut off mid-sentence, you know how much this impacts the requester's experience and the quality of data coming in.
To solve this, we’ve introduced a new option in all form definitions that indicates the maximum number of lines to use for each field label before truncation occurs. Customers can now use the options of 1 line, 2 lines, 3 lines, or unlimited to guide label display, ensuring that requesters can see the full context of a question at a glance without any extra clicks. This update ensures that even in multi-column views, fields continue to be aligned at the same height, providing a professional look across both the Service Portal and technician views. This update applies across Custom Forms, Runbooks, Service Catalog, and Change Management. For more information on form field name truncation, visit Setup: Labs.
Target SLAs with Precision Using the Advanced Scope Builder
Plan Type: All Plans | Status: General Availability
SLA scoping just got a lot more flexible. Premier tenants now have access to an Automation-style conditions builder in the “Define Scope” section; the same nested AND/OR grouping logic you already use in Automation Rules, now applied to SLA targeting. That means you can scope SLAs against any ticket field, custom field, or ESM attribute without workarounds or waiting for hardcoded field support.
All existing SLAs are automatically migrated with no change to your scope behavior. Note that time-based conditions remain part of SLA target definitions rather than scope, keeping evaluation fast and accurate at scale. For more about this feature see Service level management Define Scope.
Get Notified Your Way, on the Channels You Actually Use, with Personalized Notifications Settings
Plan Type: Advanced and Premium | Status: General Availability
Receiving simultaneous notifications across Email, Slack, MS Teams, and Mobile can be overwhelming and frankly a little loud. Previously, users were limited to a few "all-or-nothing" alert types, making it difficult to find the right balance of information. To combat notification fatigue, we have redesigned the notification experience to provide individual users with much more granular control. Instead of just a handful of standard toggles, you now have the power to decide exactly which triggers matter to you, such as when your specific input is needed for a request, when a priority changes, or when you are mentioned in a comment.
This update allows you to independently toggle these specific notification types for each channel, ensuring you only get alerted on the platforms where you are actually working. For those using Slack and MS Teams, we have introduced "anchoring" for comments, which keeps everything in context by threading updates in one place. This ensures that the conversation stays organized and easy to follow rather than cluttering your feed. Additionally, we have improved the experience for when you re-login to your chat apps. Instead of being greeted by a digital tidal wave of stale alerts, the system now only sends essential updates for new objects to keep your workspace relevant and clutter-free. To learn more about how agents can set preferred notification methods, visit Your avatar dropdown menu.
Other Notable Enhancements
- Improve the field experience with Shareable Links for ITSM Objects on Mobile App
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. Have a feature request? Upvote or submit your request here.
