ITSM Solution
Posted by ButterscotchNice7656@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 46 comments
Morning Folks,
I've lost all love for my inherited helpdesk solution that was in complete disarray when I took my current role. I don't want to say the solution, as given my recent conversation with them, they would know exactly who I am - don't want to burn the bridge until I've got options in place.
Paid 15k (UK) in consultation charges to get it updated and some additional features (and training). It's better, but also on prem and requires a degree to pretty much do anything new.
Fast forward 1 year and they have released a new super version with lots of lovely features. Said "can I have the files and we'll update". No, they said - you need another 10k in consultant fee's to implement. So now, despite an incredibly expensive product, I'm not able to update anymore.
What do you use?
Is it on-prem/cloud?
Did you set up from scratch - is it relatively simple to maintain/add?
Is it ground breakingly expensive?
Have various departments that will be using it. Ideally, I'd like:
ITSM
Asset management (linked to ITSM)
Cheaper costs for light users
GOOD Reporting
Department support
Guides/Documents that can be used/published
Self Service
I've got 8 months before our contract is up to decide.
Thoughts?
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
We are evaluating options right now for a 400 person org and so far Halo is winning.
It seems to cover all bases while being easy to setup/adapt which is going to be critical for us since we're not great at ITSM and ITIL as it stands, we can't go to anything too complex or rigid or people won't want to use it.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
What is your timeline for getting the new system in and why are you changing?
man__i__love__frogs@reddit
Current ticket system is Sharepoint and Power Automate based. We've grown significantly, and don't have good ITIL maturity for our size to begin with. We were looking for something that is both a full ITSM but isn't too enterprise and rigid where we spend more time learning the tool, learning to adapt what we do into the tool, or dealing with clunky UIs and workflows. Just something easy to use even if it isn't perfect.
Change Management for us right now just needs to be a checkbox and field of text and a workflow that emails that text to the right people. Ease of use of this kind of stuff is our biggest barrier right now.
IT will be onboarding it for IT only use with a goal of 1-2 months, then other internal teams in the company that do support based things will join down the road (facilities, HR, and software support and risk (we are a financial institution) will use it as well. Multi-step approvals and workflows and that sort of thing were mandatory for these teams.
We're also hoping to get more stats to track things like outages of internal solutions versus cloud/vendor, etc... and break that down.
We evaluated a bunch from Ninja and Fresh Service. By all accounts Halo seems the easiest to start rolling with the simplest drag and drop workflow builder you don't need to be a dev to learn it like JIRA or ServiceNow. Seemed the most likely to increase buy in and adoption from people because of the ease of use.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
We have gone Sharepoint as the local intranet, from a 3rd party company. It's been.....interesting!
Good information - be interested to hear how you get on with the setup and deployment. I saw the drag an drop builder in the videos and I alwasy wonder if it's just a catch and that secretly you need to THEN do the underlying programming. I think I've developed trust issues!
mattberan@reddit
You paid $15k to get it updated?!
That's probably what our average customer pays for our solution annually!
Full disclosure that I work for InvGate. We definitely hit your requirement list - AND - most of our customers can go live in WEEKS not months.
We're a no BS player in the space, our pricing is right on our site and we have a 30-day full feature free trial.
No bait and switch. No traps.
DMs are open - google me or find us on YouTube to learn more!
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
We did indeed (but it was £ not $ - so 20,000 in Freedom Eagles/Dollhairs!).
It was a need, rather than a want though. I had joined the company and inherited the solution. It was a mess, it had 6 years of data inside and was so far behind, that updating was no longer straight forward.
I had to pay the money and get the system working and obtain some knowledge for day to day operation as there were far greater things that needed to be tackled first.
I'll for sure take a look at your system too, nothing is off the table yet!
mattberan@reddit
Hostage as a service - sorry you had to drop that kind of budget - hope the next partner you pick is a true partner!
BornAcanthaceae5850@reddit
switched to movitera after a similar nightmare. way simpler, no consultant needed.
alraffa218@reddit
Can empthasize with you on your current situation!! Halo will do the job best imo.
DM me with specific details and probably will be able to provide specific insights. FYI i was a SME on ITSM for one of the leading vendors.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Looks like a solid solution, that ticks a lot of the boxes - why can't they just offer pricing without having to sell your soul and email and have endless calls and conversations.
Transparancy with pricing is such a bug bear to me.
alraffa218@reddit
Is your requirement On Premise or Saas? Whats the total number of IT Users ( Users who will work on tickets and on Assets) and Number of IP Based Assets? Can certainly help you (not trying to provide any services) in the evaluation assistance.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
I'm actually easy on this. I initially ruled out SAAS because we have a mature enviroment (SQL clusters, VM type enviroment, multiple DC's, snapshots, etc). With the consultant fees, support contract increases and the lack of features, the SAAS version actually stacks up cheaper for those that publish pricing.
4 teams with different uses, with about 30 users. 1200 odd end users.
Apreciate everyones input. I've got time to do some POC's, lots of reading, watching and learning, so going to use the time and not jump into the first offered solution!
alraffa218@reddit
Goodluck!! With your environment, any new vendor that you choose - negotiate the Sandbox + a Passive Environment as part of the bundle FOC. Sandbox for the purposes which are quite obvious. But a passive environment for old Helpdesk data. You should be able to negotiate that!!
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Thanks - suspect this is going to be an interesting one.
We have a dev enviroment at the moment for our current solution. Quite like being able to build and test out changes prior to the live rollout.
I think I'm going to make a full list of the good suggestions coming out here. I'm wondering how likely we'll get the data out the old system. I'm going to guess it'll need another consultant, it's a theme.
alraffa218@reddit
Dont bring outside consultants unless absolutely necessary (especially for migration)!!! "Too many cooks spoil the broth". Upskill someone inhouse. No one would know your environment and challanges better then you and your team.
As my man Jalen Hurts (NFL QB) says - Keep the main thing, the main thing. In your case having the new ITSM platform in 8 months.
Old-Support6650@reddit
Top 10 IT Help Desk Solutions available right now (All of these have 4 Star + ratings and incorporate some form of Ai):
Zendesk Suite
Freshservice
Zoho Desk
Xurrent
Ninja One
Live Agent
ManageEngine Service Desk Plus
InvGate Service Desk
FreshDesk
SysAid
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Seen loads of lists like this and through searching, which is why I was looking for personal recommendations (or avoidance!!). I've had a few messages and suggestions above for Halo that never shown up during my searches.
Doing a bit of digging last night and it appears to be a very capable, yet usable solution!
As it'll be from new, I was asking about the actual setup too - using a helpdesk is the easy bit, setting it and the administration is the bit I'm asking about.
Cheers!
PossibleProfessor134@reddit
Adding desk365 to the list .it is lightweight and cheaper
magfoo@reddit
GLPI
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
I shall have a look, but while I support for projects like that, it is harder to push past the powers that pay the bills. They are interested in financial checks, longevity, etc.
BWMerlin@reddit
You can self host for free or if leadership wants some formal support they have paid support options as well.
magfoo@reddit
Da ist ja eine Firma hinter, der man auch Geld überweisen kann.
NoDistrict1529@reddit
Not a fan of FreshServices asset manager tbh. It leave a lot to desire coming from Snipe-IT.
Frothyleet@reddit
As someone who has bumped into data analytics in the past - any tool, even with the best reporting, requires you to put in substantial work to get useful reporting. There's no one-size-fits all. Everyone has different needs/wants.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
That is a fair point to make. I've spent AGES sorting out the user groups, the categories and types to get some meaningful data for board reports and such like. It dumps it all to a PowerBI report. You look at it wrong and it breaks the whole report.
I gave it to someone who is a regular user for help and they gave up - it's like it's been coded some odd way, instead of using the data tools within PowerBI.
We made some major changes internally and I was asked pre/post changes what the tickets were like. Not a clue. Had to dump all the tickets and sort them myself.
Anything is a vast improvement on that.
absolute-degen1337@reddit
Just use anything other than Jira.
Colink98@reddit
What do you use?
Halo ITSM
Is it on-prem/cloud?
Cloud
Did you set up from scratch - is it relatively simple to maintain/add?
Yes we did most of the heavy lifting
But i have a strong team and Team Halo are very helpful
Is it ground breakingly expensive?
Depends on the value you gain from the platform.
Names license £870 per seat per year
Concurrent License £1500 per seat per year.
We have 120 agent globally all sharing 7 concurrent lics.
Departments using the platform are
IT Support
App Support
Infra
Dev
Data
Finance
CS
Operations
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
That's a couple that have mentioned Halo ITSM now. Thank you for sharing prices - why they can't publish an approximate guide, is beyond me.
Interseting approach to licencing too. I like the idea of some additional concurrent licences for fringe departments that could share a licence for light touch!
Thank you - it's moved up the list now.
coolbeaNs92@reddit
We moved to Halo and it's pretty good.
Like all ITSM tools, you have to put in work to get a decent product, but Halo has very good foundations in my opinion.
eclipse75@reddit
fresh service is commonly recommended
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Have you experience with it? Looking for people that actually live and breath it if possible, from the back end side. It's going to be a blank implentation, so I don't want to be a rocket surgeon if possible and end up having to write (blag) code or rely on consultants. Again.
eclipse75@reddit
in testing, yes. it was my recommendation that our department go with forward with that option. we ended up going with a different option due to contractual issues as I work in the government.
fresh service kind of looks like service now but already set up. you can spin up a demo environment for free and play with that. it is intuitive and easy to administrate.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Spoken to a couple of colleagues who use Service Now that are NHS based. Much bigger teams, but seemed to do the job. One of the team used to use it too, but he said it didn't get good reviews internally. I'll add Fresh Service to the list to dig into. :)
Due_Programmer_1258@reddit
We use FS in production (also UK based, but nowhere near NHS size!) - from what I understand, SNOW is your gold standard but takes a hell of a lot of configuration and full-time development work to bring to bear. We found FS rather intuitive, and it has been working well for us. All in all very pleased with the solution.
hirschaj@reddit
Xurrent / Cloud / set up from scratch / there is little to no maint and it's pretty easy to add to it / definitely does not break the bank :-) You should add it to your list to consider. 8 months is plenty of time so you should be able to do a great job finding the right solution for your needs. You were wise to start the search early.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Thanks for another one! After finding the site (I kept getting auto-corrected to Current), I had a quick look. You got any idea on pricing?
Another one who doesn't publish any form of pricing......
"What are the specific prices for each license plan?
Xurrent does not publish specific pricing for its license plans because each is tailored to the individual organization's needs. We assure you our pricing is highly competitive, often reducing costs by 50% or more compared to your current solution. For detailed pricing information, please contact Xurrent directly."
I like the AI implementation of grouping tickets and some of the other standard features.
Is making the ITSM/helpdesk all about looking like a messaging app now? Most of them are starting to look like a colourful Teams app!
Cheers,
MurrghFromIT@reddit
JIRA Service Management was what we migrated to. Super easy to configure for your needs. And it’s cheap.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Everything I've seen involving JIRA seemed to be about development based enviroments, project management and teams wanting to high-five each other. What kind of enviroment are you in?
MurrghFromIT@reddit
I’m in a heavily regulated medical device environment.
JIRA Service Management is different than the standard JIRA which is typically used for Software development and project management. The Service Management side works great and is highly customizable based on your business practices. I’ve also integrated it into Teams so it’s easy for users to submit tickets.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Ah, excellent - I just saw their products were different as you posted. Makes sense. I'd like Teams integration. Our existing solution has it.....if we pay for a consultant to turn it on for us and make some "changes".
I expect within the next 6-12 months, we'll have everyone on Teams, so would be a nice addition. Users are primarily on RDS terminals which was a pain for the voice side, but have just setup the 1st 50 on an alternative solution that overcomes that!
Apreciate the info though!
Warm_Share_4347@reddit
siit itsm, user based pricing and no billing for approvers, cloud, asset, workflows, integrations, good reporting and api capabilities
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Looks a bit odd compared to traditional systems??
The issue I could forsee with this would be the amount of integration required - lots of our systems COULD integrate, but would likely all not due to the support companies not wanting/willing to help.
I'll have a bit more of a look at this - it's been bookmarked!
MFKDGAF@reddit
Not saying the vendor's name is a selfish dick move. This subreddit exists to help the community of sysadmins and by not saying their name, you arent helping the community.
There could be other sysadmins out there right now looking at this vendor. If you were to say the vendors name then those sysadmin could proceed with caution and don't repeat the same experience as you are going through right now.
ButterscotchNice7656@reddit (OP)
Ah, I understand the sentiment, but I'm trying to not end up in a shituation where they MIGHT spot the post and make it difficult during the last 8 months.
Ideally, I'd like to get my data prior to ending the solution (once you stop support, the system dies, despite being on-prem in this instance).
When you search for ITSM or similar, they don't even show - not in any searches I've ever seen anyhow. They are pushing hard to get us to move to SAAS so they "upgrade" for us, but again - big consulation costs.
I'm guessing new customers would go straight to SAAS, so likely not repeating our path (which appears to be custom per user).
When I'm sorted in months, I'll re-visit this for SURE and add all the detail in. Sorry if you think it's a dick move!
nVME_manUY@reddit
Itop
Navdesh@reddit
Working as a ITSM CONSULTANT let me know if u need help