SWSD April 19th Release Highlights: New Pricing and Packaging, Virtual Agent, Runbooks, and More

We’re excited to share the following changes to the SolarWinds^® Service Desk licensing tiers and to announce significant new features across all tiers. April 2023 Release Notes

Changing our packaging tiers for SolarWinds Service Desk

Beginning April 19, 2023, the SolarWinds Service Desk licensing tiers will be revised to Essentials, Advanced, and Premier, replacing the previous Business, Professional, and Enterprise tiers. 

These changes better align SolarWinds Service Desk to the needs of our customers and the SolarWinds portfolio of observability solutions. The major highlights of these changes include the following:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is now included in all three tiers
• The new virtual agent feature is included in the Advanced and Premier tiers
• The Premier tier now includes the new runbook automated procedures templates

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is now included in all tiers

As security is top of mind for every organization—and SolarWinds continues to produce products that are Secure by Design—all tiers now include the SolarWinds Service Desk MFA feature to better protect account access.

On April 19, the administrators for customers on our new Essentials and Advanced tiers will be able to immediately enable the MFA security capabilities. 

Success Center - MFA

Enhancing collaboration tools with conversational artificial intelligence

We’re very excited to announce the introduction of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to SolarWinds Service Desk through a virtual agent for Advanced and Premier tier customers.

Two of the most important components of an IT service management (ITSM) organization are people and knowledge. It’s common for agents to repeatedly receive the same question from multiple requestors. These frequently requested support tickets can lower the efficiency and effectiveness of even the best IT support teams.

Today, we take the next step in bringing faster resolution to your requestors while continuing to improve the efficiency of your agents with conversational AI. This new virtual agent works right alongside your live agents, serving as the first stop for employees looking for help through the chat interface.

This virtual agent will leverage its AI to try and find common or specialized knowledge base articles capable of resolving your requestors’ incidents immediately without ticket creation or interaction with live agents. The virtual agent understands plain language requests such as “How do I change my email password?” or “Where can I find the list of allowed software to download?” to find and provide the pertinent knowledge base article you’ve already created. In addition, the Premier tier also provides access to over 300 common IT knowledge base articles, adding more robust knowledge to your virtual agent.   

If the virtual agent can’t find an appropriate article, the requestor is presented with an option to either submit a ticket or speak to a live agent (for IT organizations that have implemented the live chat feature). 

We’ve made the virtual agent available to both our Advanced and Premier tier customers. Some additional branding, customization, configurability, and common IT knowledge base articles (like “How to fix a slow browser”) will also be available in the coming weeks for the Premier tier.

Success Center - Virtual Agent

Introducing runbooks

Many teams must follow standard sets of procedures to resolve various incident types, from commonly occurring incidents to ones impacting mission-critical systems. One example of a documented procedure might be a list of the steps required to restore a production database from a backup. Before runbooks, documenting these procedures occurred in various tools outside of SolarWinds Service Desk, requiring agents to pivot between multiple screens to resolve incidents.

Now, admins can define these approved processes as runbooks. Runbooks contain every necessary task, approval, and notification for resolving an incident. Once a runbook is defined, an agent can search for, attach, and start the runbook on any incident.

With this feature, organizations can ensure agents follow an approved process for resolving their most common and critical incidents, improving agent efficiency and reducing the number of errors during resolution.

Success Center - Runbooks

Additional features in this release:

• Test workflows for service catalog items
• Auto save comments
• Catalog item request count
• Ability to in-line edit on incident index even with mandatory fields
• API limit enforcement
• Improved user impersonation experience

You can read more about these new features in our release notes here

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. 

Come see what else we’re working on. What We're Working On - SWSD

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