Now Available: Service Desk & Jamf Integration, New Workflow Operators & New Dashboard Widget Filter

Discovery & CMDB 

  1. SolarWinds Service Desk and Jamf Integration 

We are excited to announce that SolarWinds Service Desk now integrates with Jamf Pro! This new integration gives you visibility into asset data on Apple devices by incorporating asset information from Jamf into SolarWinds Service Desk. 

 

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When combined with data from other asset repositories and configuration management systems, you get comprehensive visibility into all IT assets across your organization, regardless of their asset type or deployment model. The Service Desk and Jamf integration allows you to import detailed information on Jamf assets such as Apple computers into your service desk.  

This visibility gives you a better understanding of your spending and risks levels across your environment, which enables you to keep costs under control and mitigate potential risks to your organization. Moreover, you can align Apple assets with key IT service management processes such as incident, problem, and change management by populating your CMDB with Jamf configuration data. In addition, you can accelerate root cause analysis by attaching Jamf asset data to incidents and problems in your service desk.  

 

Workflow & Automations 

  1. New Change and Service Catalog Workflow Operators

When configuring condition sets in the service catalog or change catalog workflows, it’s easier to exclude a value or two, rather than selecting all the relevant values for a certain condition. For example, let’s say that we want to set up a workflow in which all employees, EXCEPT FOR those in Spain, will go through a certain training program during their onboarding process. Another example is the need to set up a workflow in which we add a task to update a certain software – IF the laptop model name CONTAINS the string ‘MacBook’.   

To make your life a little easier, and your automatic workflows more effective and powerful – we added the following new workflow operators to help you do exactly that*:   

  • Drop-down fields: Equal/ Not Equal  
     
    Service Catalog.png

  • Text fields: Equal (default), Contains, Starts with, Ends with, Is empty, Is not empty   

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*NOTE: evaluation is case sensitive 

 

Reporting and Analytics 

  1. Dashboards: Advanced Incident Widgets Customization 

Looking at IT service metrics doesn’t automatically make you and your service desk operations data-driven. It’s looking at the RIGHT metrics, their measurement over time and continuously iterating on improving them - that ultimately help you capitalize on the Service Desk reporting and analytics capabilities.  

In our effort to make sure that you get the most actionable data in real-time – we added the entire set of filters that is currently available at the Incident Index – to the incident widgets on the dashboard as well.   

While the widgets are already grouped by certain attributes (assignees, sites, categories, and so on) - the addition of the filters allows you to slice this information further - and focus only on what you need and want to see.  

For example, seeing all the active incidents your team has filtered by assignee. Previously you would have to create a widget for each one of your team members and then add up the total number of incidents across the whole team to know the actual workload.  

Now, you can simply create A NEW "Incidents by Assigned To” widget and filter by all the individuals or teams you would like to see: 

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This allows you to see how many tickets each member has assigned to them, and even silo it out to certain states. 

A second example would be seeing all active tickets across different sites. Until today, the dashboard widget would show incidents for all sites in the whole organization that are not in the Resolved or Closed states.  

Starting today, you can create A NEW ”Incidents by Site” filter for only the sites that you manage and can even say which states you care about: 

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Employee Engagement 

  1. Enable/block requester from creating portal accounts 

While many of our customers use the service portal to engage with their employees, there are some customers who also use it to engage with external customers. This means that in some cases, admins would want only employees to have access to the portal and prefer to create an account for them during the onboarding process. In other cases – end users will open their own accounts by themselves, through the portal’s login page. 

Since different customers have different needs, and even in the case of internal employees - requesters are not always aware that they have an existing account and end up creating additional accounts - we are now allowing you to choose whether to allow this option or not. 

To disable the option of opening an account via the portal, go to Setup>Global Settings>Service Portal page and switch this toggle off: 

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Agent Productivity 

  1. Change Category Enhancements 

We recently introduced change categories and subcategories to your service desk. Today, we’re enhancing these capabilities to help you better utilize them in your environment. 

Now, you can apply categories and subcategories to the ‘Stacked By’ and ‘Filter’ values in the ‘Changes Over Time’ report. This will help you slice and dice these reports by these fields to better understand how you’re handling changes.  

Additionally, you can select categories and subcategories as Conditions in Automation Rules. This makes our automation capabilities more powerful and dynamic, since you can now trigger an automation based on a change category and subcategory. 

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