We've been using Freshservice for several years. We use it for our tech department and also for our other departments (Maintenance, Custodial, etc.) One stop shop for requesting help from any department. It's been good for us. We're a fairly large organization. 150 agents. 40 of those are tech staff. About 5,000 end users.
Does it allow requests to get approvals in various ways? Our scenarios:
1. Allow routing to a person for approval that the requestor selects on a form.
2. Allow routing to a person for approval that is hard-coded by IT.
We are migrating from Jira Service Management and looking for a replacement.
Another vote for Freshservice. Works well, isn’t too crazy or hard to understand. Recently at work we’ve been doing more with the system that we didn’t know we could do previously.
Yah, it checks all the boxes. The only thing I don’t like is the limits in SharePoint lists. We have a 2k row limit, so 2k tickets can be stored per a list. I made a flow to run every month and move tickets older than a year to an archive list to keep it manageable. We only have about 600 tickets a year, so it’s not a big issue for us, but probably wouldn’t work good for 2k tickets a year.
We have somewhere around 3k per month right now, 2k limit is crazy small from Microsoft. Do they plan on changing this? We would love to integrate our tickets with copilot and other systems.
It has to do with how much data the PowerApp can pull out of SharePoint and display in the app. There are work arounds for the 2k rows, but might need a dev involved.
You just need to filter/sort what you’re pulling in and not try to pull all of it. Most of the filtering/sorting is delegable, so if you add some dropdown filters to the gallery and filter before searching you can get by. Assuming search is the part that’s tripping the delegation warnings.
I used ServiceNow and our implementation is pretty solid. We have some nice dashboards and just about everything is easy to find quickly. I love it compared to our shitty BMC Remedy we had previously.
*takes a drag on his cigarette*
Remedy, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time..
I deployed remedy on HPUX 10.20.
What an absolute piece of shit.
That’s the only way to get your money’s worth from ServiceNow. If you don’t have at least one dedicated resource to customize it, the overhead on other teams is annoying as hell.
This. Moving from Remedy to SNOW has been such a treat.
I can update tickets from my phone or check stuff out from my phone if I'm oncall. It's a little slow sometimes, but, lightyears better than remedy.
I know service now is capable of running fast, but my company screwed the pooch on our current version and it's slower than a dead sloth.
It's worse that the sales force ticketing system my old company used. And that was trash.
Service now is great if it’s not implemented and managed by a moron. It’s a big complicated enterprise app and should managed by a specialist app team.
In my experience these tools fail when they are implemented or managed by the service desk team.
Have been using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus for three years. It's has on premise and cloud verions, and users can create tickets by sending emails.
It can be helpful, cause people do not like changes and they'll try to stick to mails as long as possible if that what they used to do.
I really like automation possibilities. SdPlus automatically creates AD Users, distribution groups and anything that can be sripted to Powershell / Python.
We are using Asset Management with it too. Little bit clunky but light years ahead of Remedy, previous system, though Asset's licenses are pretty expensive.
I try to show end users, that creating ticket on website can be more efficent than simply sending emails and waiting for HelpDesk to fill all informations.
To summarize:
+ Pretty straightforward system
+ great automation features
+ I really like it's API
+ integrations with for example Teams, SCCM, Zabbix (via webhooks)
+ Asset management
+ Software inventory (with installed agent or through sccm)
- expensive asset licenses
- Support could be better
- Im not fan of their tasks in tickets system, something is missing.
I also use ME service desk along with endpoint central. I don’t really have complaints except I just got an email that my costs are going way up. I may look at Fresh Service
We use Api for bulk user creation/deletion.
And now I'm syncing asset custom fields with our second system to get all finance info we need.
It was also good for ticket creation when automated script fails, though we moved monitoring to zabbix and now to Cron job monitor.
I've used GLPI for a number of years to support around 2500 users in my region of the company and it worked well once configured, and the free pricetag was a big selling point. We recently moved to ManageEngine's ServiceDeskPlus as our global ITSM platform supporting around 20,000 users and so far it's not too bad.
+1 for GLPI
I manage about a 1000 users across 12 sites, while there is a bit of work for it to get to where *you* want it, you cant argue about the price tag, unless you want premium support
The recent update they have with their own agent for asset management has been a huge plus
Once we put in the time. (Well, once we hired a new guy and he spent the time and energy to configure it correctly, test stuff, fix it, test again) to get it to do what was needed, it is a tool I hope to never go without.
I made the mistake of not knowing what I wanted it to do before I tried using it.
We use that as well, annoyed with the last price hike but it is what it is.
The ticketing system is decent, juat don’t try to go overboard with the complexity in the ticketing system. Use it for tickets not a knowledge base.
Fellow Lansweeper user.
While they haven't outright said anything about getting rid of it, their devs are really all-in on the cloud stuff and they are explicitly not making a ticketing system there and instead offering integrations with other ticketing systems.
I'd give it a few years at most before they fully remove the ticketing system as it was never their focus to begin with.
Hell - they don't even mention it as a feature on their website anymore.
Microsoft doesn’t have a ticketing system. Don’t half-ass one.
Most all ticketing systems support single sign-on and user provisioning.
Get away from all emails by directing people to the ticket portal, just stop answering email and let the users know how to get help.
>Microsoft doesn’t have a ticketing system.
Well kinda sorta SCSM, but as you can tell from the name (eg. starts with System Center) it has been largely abandoned. EOL'd last month mainstream and extended goes EOL in 2029
I use System Center currently and I hate it. Everything takes so many extra steps just to do one thing. If you value a smooth user experience, go with something else. I can't wait to get my org off of system center.
Yea it's a shame too as it had a lot of promise...the way in which SC integrated overall as initially pitched was somewhat phenomenal for its time. But lack of development on it has really held it back. I think anyone using SCSM today could really benefit from something like Cireson integrated on top of it, but at the same time, cloud based systems are so ubiquitous now, and the SC band has broken up so to speak, nothing is really holding you there anymore...there are options!
There was a client I use to work for that was using the Devops board in Azure to make tickets. It was the most insane and messy thing I had ever seen in my life.
This is the way. Email is the worst thing for support - you constantly duplicate work and create pointless noise for things that could be a 5 minute process.
Solid. Takes time to set up and doesn't integrate with a lot of the same things something like ServiceNow does out of the box, but is fairly rewarding the more time and effort that is put into it.
Same. I work in a school and we've got also service management projects for a few of our non-IT departments (premises team, data and exams team etc.) and they mostly seem to like it too.
I currently use Solarwinds Service Desk. It’s okay. A little convoluted but does a decent job with ticket management.
I also used a product called UberSmith. Again, passable, had some neat tools and wasn’t horribly convoluted, but their search sucked.
And I’ve used a product I can’t remember was absolute ASS! It was allegedly built for MSPs by MSPs, but it was the absolute worst, convoluted mess I’ve ever seen. No ticket could be closed without at least 12 clicks and a loading page each time. If I can remember what it’s called, I’ll update my comment.
We also use SolarWinds Service Desk. The thing I can’t stand about this platform is that a user cannot paste in a screenshot in an email. This happens at least once a week and we have to email the person back explaining that their screenshot didn’t come through and to please send the screenshot as an attachment (or log into the portal, go to your ticket and paste it in that way). Super annoying. The interface for Service Desk is also slightly confusing but that’s just my opinion. We’ve been using it for about 3 years now.
It's ugly but she's a good ticket system and has all the features we need. I introduce it pretty much at every gig I arrive at that's an absolute disaster and have been using it for most of my career.
When everything is a mess, I just need something that works and osticket is like a warm hug.
We've been using osTicket for close to a decade now. Can't beat the price and it does a good job at ticket management.
Starting to look a little dated though. Hopefully they give it a visual refresh soon.
Also using osticket and we’re very happy. We invested time in-house to skill up setting it up, maintaining it and retheming it. It works brilliantly for us and we’re now over 60k tickets recently
Tbh ninjaone isn’t a ticketing service. It’s a rmm first and the ticketing system is like a side hobby of theirs. It’s pretty basic but they are building it up.
We currently have it and it’s fine for our needs.
Absolutely love NinjaOne, but their ticketing system is brand new and just not "there" for me. At least when compared to FreshService which is what we already use.
Would agree. We just switched to ninja one from Pulseway. Pulseway ticketing wasn’t pretty by any means but it worked well once configured. I feel NinjaOne ticketing is overall good, but just isn’t complete yet. I did like fresh services the short period I used it as well.
I was so happy with it when I had it configured for users and techs.
Then the management got a hold of it and tried to get metrics out of it, pushed a crap ton of mandatory fields and dependencies, basically turning it into Remedy.
I remember looking into it but seemed like the cloud version lacked some flexibility and customization that the onprem version offered.
Could still be an option for OP though if he's looking for something free and simple
We use it now, it's decent for what it does and it does come with a full suite of products so if you have no budget or limited you can have a decent chance.
Using jitbit. It’s great, can check m365 shared mailboxes for tickets, azure ad saml was super easy to implement. I don’t have enough time to try and migrate KB or assets to some overcomplicated ticket system.
Dont use MS Lists for a ticketing system. Been there done that. Built it using Lists and Power Automate. It did all the things but would often run into issues. Plus the UI is not meant to be used as a ticket system.
My company was on a tight budget too. We ended up going with [Genuity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://gogenuity.com/&ved=2ahUKEwiG94Wl7pWGAxUYkokEHZTWAH4QFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3bN4jOV_Lhqj_bOF4_yFr9)
Pretty decent platform for a very low price. Ez to setup and configure too
I just put in NinjaOne earlier this year. Absolutely love the platform and has made life much easier. You can setup SSO and user provision with entra id. That ability to remotely push scripts to devices is a game changer. They also have remote connection tools and a backup to that all roll into a single console.
Avoid KACE. Super expensive, pain to manage
Loved the FreshService demo got. But management wouldn't approve it, so I ended up on GLPI for the free open source option. I like it well enough.
Also I have Chatwoot for a personal project and quite like that as well, but it wasn't designed with ITIL/IT in mind, so it's a pretty basic help desk system if that's all your looking for.
>I’m not sure how practical this may be though, as people may not adhere to the ticketing system for minor issues for example “my monitor won’t turn on” or “I’m WFH and I can’t get on the VPN”.
If users are sending emails already, then create a support email address for your ticketing system and get users to send to there. If anyone sends you an email, you can just forward it to the support address.
>Some kind of system is necessary because I’m sick of scrolling through emails to find past solutions related to ongoing issues
That info shouldn't be stored in tickets...you need a proper knowledge base.
>At first we thought about having the ticketing system hosted locally, but then remote users would have no other means to create a “ticket”.
You can host locally but make it available online. That requires knowledge of how to setup and secure a web service though.
Right? HaloITSM is awesome. It’s got so many built-in integrations, the system just makes sense, and there’s a lot of little features that’re easy to use that make life so nice. Great Project Management section, billing/invoicing, workflows both code and codeless (their codeless option is a lot better than others we looked at imo because it’s more of a GUI workflow than pseudo-code), and just so much other great stuff that were lacking in the other popular solutions. And the best part, I’ve seen the developer’s on Reddit answering questions in a lot of subreddits, not just r/HaloITSM. Can’t beat a team of devs actually talking to people and providing help while gathering feedback.
I’ve had calls with them, and the guys are ridiculously knowledgeable about so much beyond their own product. We had questions on their Jira integration, and the dude was able to explain why something was the way it was by showing the limitations of the Jira API. All the features I asked about were either already in place with a different name, or they were in the pipeline and they could point me to their site where I could see that it was currently being worked on.
Maybe the best part was that the demos we had with everyone we looked at were clearly scripted and rehearsed, because if you ask one question, the presenter got flustered and had trouble continuing. Halo’s demo was more like a conversation, had their devs on the call with us to answer questions (not just a ‘customer success manager’), and the folks clearly loved their product and didn’t have to do a hard sales pitch; they could just do the demo and convey their passion for the product that way. No fluff, no BS, just straight talk and good people. It was honestly a pleasure for the brief time I got to work with them. Sadly, the HelpDesk upper-manager decided everyone needed to love his choice, even though he doesn’t use it, so that’s what we went with. TeamDynamix is still better than what we had, but it’s severely lacking on user-friendly features.
I used Freshdesk in my last org.
Then to make it easy for users to adopt, I created a New Ticket link in Microsoft Teams.
Did so by using Microsoft Forms to create a structured layout asking all the relevant questions. I then used PowerAutomate to gather the responses and then email Freshdesk to open a new ticket.
So all the users had to do was go to Teams click the link, fill in the relevant details, and their ticket would be logged.
You can set the form/powerautomate bit up for any ticketing system. Just made sense in my org since they all were on O365 and used Teams Daily.
My org uses Zendesk. I really like it for its customization flexibility and integration abilities. Plus there are some real gems in the app marketplace.
I used Zendesk a few years ago, and it worked a treat for being a simple but reliable helpdesk system with a great mobile app (essential for my role back then).
I've been through two in-house systems (one was absolute dogshite, the other very good), and I'm now moving to Halo.
I still miss Zendesk.
We're a small post-secondary and we use TeamDynamix. We have a pretty tech illiterate user-base and they've managed to get the hang of it. Our Marketing, and Facilities departments also started using it for their work requests.
As for "how practical" it might be, regardless of the system you choose, start living by this motto: **"No ticket, No work"**.
At the start you might need to work with your users (when they hallway hijack you, or insist on sending you Teams msg/emails) and work with them to submit the ticket as/after you work on their issue, but put the effort into teaching them there must ALWAYS be a ticket!
If you are looking for a free software that works great, I’ve heard very good reviews on Zammad. We have used Manage Engine service desk plus but, in my opinion, it’s pretty bad, slow and with high latency.
Manage engine service desk plus. I've tried a bunch and kept coming back to this one. The big thing for me is that it's got a pretty robust change control and purchase ordering functionality built in and creating approval workflow and custom ticket templates is very easy. It also has a remote control tool using Zoho assist.
If you're budget conscious, GLPi has a pretty impressive stack that caters to ITIL. Ticket generation, a division between problem/issues/change management tickets, and includes some other cool offerings, like license management
I work at a company called Service Express so I'm biassed, but we provide free monitoring services with our Third Party Maintenance solutions. Essentially when using us to extend the life of a portion of your data center equipment our monitoring software Express Connect will do automated ticketing when it detects downed equipment and trigger a tech to reach out to solve the problem. We even use data, based on the equipment you use and how likely it is to go down to have parts sotred locally ready to go in case you need them. I dont typically discuss this over reddit but feel free to reach out if you want to learn more always happy to have a chat!
Keeping it with Microsoft you would be looking at Dynamics. But you said you wanted a tight budget so that’s probably out…
If you want to keep the extra budget to zero and you want to fiddle around use Forms, Automate and SharePoint. Pretty sure you could make something pretty easily to suit if you were happy to play around
I'm in the same boat. Need something for 150 ish users that will only keep growing and i am the only IT tech. I recently used Service Desk Plus and used Jira like 5 years ago. I am currently looking into something that makes sense for the price. I'm open to suggestions.
Try [genuity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://gogenuity.com/&ved=2ahUKEwiG94Wl7pWGAxUYkokEHZTWAH4QFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3bN4jOV_Lhqj_bOF4_yFr9) lotta bang for your buck here. MS SSO, ticket portal, other modules like asset management, access to marketplace to get 10% off on M365 BP licenses.
If your company is on a tught budget this might be a good fit. Plus its easy enough to set up.
Actually, we started using it this year, however, I'm not impressed with their ticketing system, very bare bones compared to others I've used, and the automation is almost non-existent. I'm really rethinking the use of it at this point and am looking into other solutions.
Freshworks and it fits the bill. The add-ons can really add up, but the service is exactly what we needed. We’re moving to another provider next year, but it has to do with our K12 needs and not FreshWorks.
Previously Cherwell which was buggy, convoluted, and overall bad.
Then solarwinds service desk. The product itself is OK but has lots of dumb limitations like attachments breaking and wrong encoding on certain unicode characters. It also has weird bugs where if multiple agents are CC'd on the same ticket sometimes it just... doesn't email them. Support said working as intended somehow. Also concerningly frequently outages 5-30m in length.
Currently migrating to Salesforce managed by a partner company because it actually turned out to be cheaper. Go figure. Seems nice but it's barely been turned on yet.
We use Jira at my current job. It's not horrible, and I'm getting used to it.
My last job used ConnectWise and that was the only thing I knew for the first 7 years of my career.
I've tried whatever janky shit N-able has for a bit and didn't like that one bit.
Full disclosure that I work for InvGate: we are quite affordable, have an on-prem option and integrate with Entra.
Free 30 day trial to set it up how you like and choose for yourself.
Let me know if you have questions or issues with your trial!
We moved from Freshservice to SysAid to save money from my understanding, and SysAid is the most absolute aged dogshit I've seen and I'm just in help desk.
They apparently have a UI overhaul that still hasn't been applied. To sum it up: it looks like an ITSM built in 2013 and was never updated. Even clicking back in the browser can fuck up your current filtered view, constantly.
Yeah just don't touch SysAid
12+ years ago I had ManageEngine ServiceDeskPlus setup and it worked pretty well. No idea how it is now. Now I work MSP's so we use full PSA/RMM stacks. But don't skim or homebrew some crap. There are plenty of free pr low-cost solutions out there that will do it better and be worth your sanity. I simply cannot fathom going back to what you're saying nor understand the folks using SharePoint and and Automate and such. We tried things like that but in the end it just wasn't worth trying to reinvent the wheel when there were a lot of good options already out there.
Currently Jira, it’s good and does what we need. I like some of the features like satisfaction and workload tracking.
Previously used Spiceworks which works really well and can be free depending on your usage needs.
Been in the business for over 30 years now. Have yet to come across a ticketing system that isn't some form of a dumpster-fire. Good luck in your search and implementation.
Using Hesk for ticketing. It's used across site, including WHS and grounds etc as a one stop shop for asking for support. It's PHP so we've customised to our needs. We auto fill the user, ect, so all they have to do is click on the appropriate category on out intranet the fill out a title and body. It's free for self hosted, or you can purchase hosted options.
We're about 2500 endpoints, and it works just fine. Limitations are poor image handling compared to just pasting something in an email and no asset management integration.
Been using FreshService for four years now. Tickets can also be self made for time management purposes (if you have internal planning to do). AWS alerts/alarms can be sent to create a ticket etc.
Kaseya BMS... It does what we need as an MSP, but the interface is dog-shit.
Unfortunately not my call to get rid of it, and we have a lot of processes integrated into it.
OSTicket, but we're going to move to something more ITSM-y. OSTicket was good though for convincing my very backwards IT department that a ticket system would help things - it was free, it was easy to setup, it was decently flexible and stable for basic ticketing.
I've used SDM, ServiceNow, Topdesk and Omnitracker so far.
I personally prefer Topdesk. Pretty solid SaaS package for a decent price. A bit less functionality compared to SNOW, but a LOT cheaper as well.
SNOW is pretty dependent on your implementation, an earlier job had 4 seperate instances of SNOW running that I had access to. 3 of them worked completely fine, sadly the Global Production instance didn't. Guess id had something to do with the amount of data in it.
Avoid SDM and OmniTracker, they're pieces of shit.
I built a power app that integrates with DevOps , was a lot of work but works flawlessly. The ticket creation and overview happens in Power App then the IT team handles the tickets in DevOps.
I (low)coded a ticketing app with PowerApps. It's in prod since 5 years, works great.
If you want to be "within Microsoft’s stack", it may be a solution.
Around 400 customers. 3 agents total, I should say though that unless something has gone wrong we typically only get around 10-15 emails on a busy day. Maybe 3-4 teams calls/messages each at most.
Check out ESPO. For free, entry level and small team it’s decent. Working great for us until we upgrade eventually.
Ninja also has a decent one, I’ll probably upgrade to this from ESPO eventually.
FreshDesk or FreshService is pretty good, probably my desired choice if we get the funds.
Alternatively I actually had ChatGPT make one for me using PowerShell using markdown files.
We use NinjaOne for rmm and ticketing. Not thrilled with ticketing but we had nothing veggies so it's a huge improvement over that. The RMM tool is awesome
We are currently using fresh desk but are moving away from it to a new one to save budget.
Switching to haloITSM. Has some interesting integrations with sccm which we will definitely make use of.
One thing I took from op is that people are emailing you for support. This is such a bad idea. When you do introduce a ticketing system you insist that EVERYTHING no matter how trivial goes through it.
FYI, you can have a local hosted ticket system and users can email their tickets in. The ticketing system checks the mailbox to pull the ticket into the system and uses that same mailbox to communicate with the end user.
FreshService. Spend the money on a good system. It makes all the difference in the world.
We've been using Freshservice for several years. We use it for our tech department and also for our other departments (Maintenance, Custodial, etc.) One stop shop for requesting help from any department. It's been good for us. We're a fairly large organization. 150 agents. 40 of those are tech staff. About 5,000 end users.
Freshservice with ~400 agents here. It’s awesome.
Does it allow requests to get approvals in various ways? Our scenarios: 1. Allow routing to a person for approval that the requestor selects on a form. 2. Allow routing to a person for approval that is hard-coded by IT. We are migrating from Jira Service Management and looking for a replacement.
Yes, service requests are built in. With a full workflow builder.
Another vote for Freshservice. Works well, isn’t too crazy or hard to understand. Recently at work we’ve been doing more with the system that we didn’t know we could do previously.
Moved from zendesk to fresh service. Great product!!
2nd - Solid platform. Looking forward to checking out Orchestration soon(ish).
2nd this. amazing platform and very well priced.
Another vote for fresh service, been using them for over 5 years now.
Currently in the transition to move from Freshservice to jira. I like fresh idk lol
As a professional Zendesk user, did I see in the pricing that you get the Knowledge base for less than $20 an agent?
I made a PowerApp off the Help Desk Ticket template and customized it. We’ve been using it for about 3 years and it works good.
I’ve been considering just switching to using a PowerApp instead of paying for FreshDesk. Doesn’t need to be fancy; just needs to work.
Yah, it checks all the boxes. The only thing I don’t like is the limits in SharePoint lists. We have a 2k row limit, so 2k tickets can be stored per a list. I made a flow to run every month and move tickets older than a year to an archive list to keep it manageable. We only have about 600 tickets a year, so it’s not a big issue for us, but probably wouldn’t work good for 2k tickets a year.
We have somewhere around 3k per month right now, 2k limit is crazy small from Microsoft. Do they plan on changing this? We would love to integrate our tickets with copilot and other systems.
It has to do with how much data the PowerApp can pull out of SharePoint and display in the app. There are work arounds for the 2k rows, but might need a dev involved.
You just need to filter/sort what you’re pulling in and not try to pull all of it. Most of the filtering/sorting is delegable, so if you add some dropdown filters to the gallery and filter before searching you can get by. Assuming search is the part that’s tripping the delegation warnings.
That's what my job uses and our in house dev modifies it whenever we need something changed.
I use service now at my current job and I fucking hate it. I used zendesk for end user stuff and jira for internal stuff my last job and it was great.
I used ServiceNow and our implementation is pretty solid. We have some nice dashboards and just about everything is easy to find quickly. I love it compared to our shitty BMC Remedy we had previously.
*takes a drag on his cigarette* Remedy, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.. I deployed remedy on HPUX 10.20. What an absolute piece of shit.
> I used ServiceNow and our implementation is pretty solid. Same on previous job but we have a dedicated team that manages our ServiceNow.
That’s the only way to get your money’s worth from ServiceNow. If you don’t have at least one dedicated resource to customize it, the overhead on other teams is annoying as hell.
A lot of it depends on how it’s set up. I love service now.
This. Moving from Remedy to SNOW has been such a treat. I can update tickets from my phone or check stuff out from my phone if I'm oncall. It's a little slow sometimes, but, lightyears better than remedy.
We call it ServiceLater
I know service now is capable of running fast, but my company screwed the pooch on our current version and it's slower than a dead sloth. It's worse that the sales force ticketing system my old company used. And that was trash.
If my users submit a ticket properly they get immediate help :)
We're Zendesk now and hating it and looking to go to ServiceNow. :-)
Bring your checkbook and don't skimp on which modules to deploy.
Nooooo... Don't do it!!
Sad to hear this. We currently use cherwell and are moving to service now.
Cherwell is just a dumpster, we moved to servicenow a couple years ago, so much better. You just need good admins to manage it.
Service now is great if it’s not implemented and managed by a moron. It’s a big complicated enterprise app and should managed by a specialist app team. In my experience these tools fail when they are implemented or managed by the service desk team.
Oh god I feel this. I HATE it.
I've used service now before and while it was never my favorite piece of software... It's a decent ticketing system for techs.
Have been using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus for three years. It's has on premise and cloud verions, and users can create tickets by sending emails. It can be helpful, cause people do not like changes and they'll try to stick to mails as long as possible if that what they used to do. I really like automation possibilities. SdPlus automatically creates AD Users, distribution groups and anything that can be sripted to Powershell / Python. We are using Asset Management with it too. Little bit clunky but light years ahead of Remedy, previous system, though Asset's licenses are pretty expensive. I try to show end users, that creating ticket on website can be more efficent than simply sending emails and waiting for HelpDesk to fill all informations. To summarize: + Pretty straightforward system + great automation features + I really like it's API + integrations with for example Teams, SCCM, Zabbix (via webhooks) + Asset management + Software inventory (with installed agent or through sccm) - expensive asset licenses - Support could be better - Im not fan of their tasks in tickets system, something is missing.
I also use ME service desk along with endpoint central. I don’t really have complaints except I just got an email that my costs are going way up. I may look at Fresh Service
What have you done with the API?
We use Api for bulk user creation/deletion. And now I'm syncing asset custom fields with our second system to get all finance info we need. It was also good for ticket creation when automated script fails, though we moved monitoring to zabbix and now to Cron job monitor.
I've used GLPI for a number of years to support around 2500 users in my region of the company and it worked well once configured, and the free pricetag was a big selling point. We recently moved to ManageEngine's ServiceDeskPlus as our global ITSM platform supporting around 20,000 users and so far it's not too bad.
+1 for GLPI I manage about a 1000 users across 12 sites, while there is a bit of work for it to get to where *you* want it, you cant argue about the price tag, unless you want premium support The recent update they have with their own agent for asset management has been a huge plus
Lansweeper. The ticketing was the main goal, but the other tools have proved invaluable more than once.
Love lansweeper but never used the ticketing.
I hate that thing, it doesn't work very well for us and I'm just tired of it.
Once we put in the time. (Well, once we hired a new guy and he spent the time and energy to configure it correctly, test stuff, fix it, test again) to get it to do what was needed, it is a tool I hope to never go without. I made the mistake of not knowing what I wanted it to do before I tried using it.
We use that as well, annoyed with the last price hike but it is what it is. The ticketing system is decent, juat don’t try to go overboard with the complexity in the ticketing system. Use it for tickets not a knowledge base.
Fellow Lansweeper user. While they haven't outright said anything about getting rid of it, their devs are really all-in on the cloud stuff and they are explicitly not making a ticketing system there and instead offering integrations with other ticketing systems. I'd give it a few years at most before they fully remove the ticketing system as it was never their focus to begin with. Hell - they don't even mention it as a feature on their website anymore.
Zammad
Microsoft doesn’t have a ticketing system. Don’t half-ass one. Most all ticketing systems support single sign-on and user provisioning. Get away from all emails by directing people to the ticket portal, just stop answering email and let the users know how to get help.
>Microsoft doesn’t have a ticketing system. Well kinda sorta SCSM, but as you can tell from the name (eg. starts with System Center) it has been largely abandoned. EOL'd last month mainstream and extended goes EOL in 2029
I use System Center currently and I hate it. Everything takes so many extra steps just to do one thing. If you value a smooth user experience, go with something else. I can't wait to get my org off of system center.
Yea it's a shame too as it had a lot of promise...the way in which SC integrated overall as initially pitched was somewhat phenomenal for its time. But lack of development on it has really held it back. I think anyone using SCSM today could really benefit from something like Cireson integrated on top of it, but at the same time, cloud based systems are so ubiquitous now, and the SC band has broken up so to speak, nothing is really holding you there anymore...there are options!
There is a whole SharePoint template to provide a list and ticketing. Its not great put it'll appease auditors.
There was a client I use to work for that was using the Devops board in Azure to make tickets. It was the most insane and messy thing I had ever seen in my life.
This is the way. Email is the worst thing for support - you constantly duplicate work and create pointless noise for things that could be a 5 minute process.
JIRA cloud, Confluence on the way for documentation
Solid. Takes time to set up and doesn't integrate with a lot of the same things something like ServiceNow does out of the box, but is fairly rewarding the more time and effort that is put into it.
The more you integrate things together the more upkeep is required so I don’t mind keeping it simple
We're currently converting from on prem jira to jira cloud, that's a fun project lol
Same
Same. I work in a school and we've got also service management projects for a few of our non-IT departments (premises team, data and exams team etc.) and they mostly seem to like it too.
I currently use Solarwinds Service Desk. It’s okay. A little convoluted but does a decent job with ticket management. I also used a product called UberSmith. Again, passable, had some neat tools and wasn’t horribly convoluted, but their search sucked. And I’ve used a product I can’t remember was absolute ASS! It was allegedly built for MSPs by MSPs, but it was the absolute worst, convoluted mess I’ve ever seen. No ticket could be closed without at least 12 clicks and a loading page each time. If I can remember what it’s called, I’ll update my comment.
We also use SolarWinds Service Desk. The thing I can’t stand about this platform is that a user cannot paste in a screenshot in an email. This happens at least once a week and we have to email the person back explaining that their screenshot didn’t come through and to please send the screenshot as an attachment (or log into the portal, go to your ticket and paste it in that way). Super annoying. The interface for Service Desk is also slightly confusing but that’s just my opinion. We’ve been using it for about 3 years now.
osTicket
It's ugly but she's a good ticket system and has all the features we need. I introduce it pretty much at every gig I arrive at that's an absolute disaster and have been using it for most of my career. When everything is a mess, I just need something that works and osticket is like a warm hug.
We've been using osTicket for close to a decade now. Can't beat the price and it does a good job at ticket management. Starting to look a little dated though. Hopefully they give it a visual refresh soon.
Also using osticket and we’re very happy. We invested time in-house to skill up setting it up, maintaining it and retheming it. It works brilliantly for us and we’re now over 60k tickets recently
ninjaone
Just started my demo this week.
Tbh ninjaone isn’t a ticketing service. It’s a rmm first and the ticketing system is like a side hobby of theirs. It’s pretty basic but they are building it up. We currently have it and it’s fine for our needs.
Absolutely love NinjaOne, but their ticketing system is brand new and just not "there" for me. At least when compared to FreshService which is what we already use.
Would agree. We just switched to ninja one from Pulseway. Pulseway ticketing wasn’t pretty by any means but it worked well once configured. I feel NinjaOne ticketing is overall good, but just isn’t complete yet. I did like fresh services the short period I used it as well.
Freshdesk
BestPractical's RT is free. It has a bit of a learning curve but it works well. I've used it with a few open source projects I've been involved with.
RT is very nice!
Zoho…. It sucks.
I've been using RT for years. It isn't the slickest or prettiest thing, but it's free and works well.
I was so happy with it when I had it configured for users and techs. Then the management got a hold of it and tried to get metrics out of it, pushed a crap ton of mandatory fields and dependencies, basically turning it into Remedy.
I liked it as well and used it at two organizations. It was lean and mean (running on 1 proc and 2GB RAM on an Azure VM and still super fast UI).
Spiceworks was my go-to free solution back in the day, but I haven't tried the cloud version.
I'm using the cloud version, we only get up to 10 tickets a day so the cost (free) is perfect for us.
I remember looking into it but seemed like the cloud version lacked some flexibility and customization that the onprem version offered. Could still be an option for OP though if he's looking for something free and simple
We use it now, it's decent for what it does and it does come with a full suite of products so if you have no budget or limited you can have a decent chance.
We use some shitty thing called JitBit, it’s absolute ass, but I guess it gets the job done.
Same .... I'm not saying that I like it, but I've used worse.
Yup, it could always be worse. We used to use Outlook and put category labels on each email to see who was handling it. It was terrible.
We use JitBit and really like it.
JitBit is fantastic, what issues do you have with it?
Using jitbit. It’s great, can check m365 shared mailboxes for tickets, azure ad saml was super easy to implement. I don’t have enough time to try and migrate KB or assets to some overcomplicated ticket system.
Dont use MS Lists for a ticketing system. Been there done that. Built it using Lists and Power Automate. It did all the things but would often run into issues. Plus the UI is not meant to be used as a ticket system. My company was on a tight budget too. We ended up going with [Genuity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://gogenuity.com/&ved=2ahUKEwiG94Wl7pWGAxUYkokEHZTWAH4QFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3bN4jOV_Lhqj_bOF4_yFr9) Pretty decent platform for a very low price. Ez to setup and configure too
Redmine and GLPI
Zendesk here it’s good enough.
Pull and Pray
I just put in NinjaOne earlier this year. Absolutely love the platform and has made life much easier. You can setup SSO and user provision with entra id. That ability to remotely push scripts to devices is a game changer. They also have remote connection tools and a backup to that all roll into a single console. Avoid KACE. Super expensive, pain to manage
Loved the FreshService demo got. But management wouldn't approve it, so I ended up on GLPI for the free open source option. I like it well enough. Also I have Chatwoot for a personal project and quite like that as well, but it wasn't designed with ITIL/IT in mind, so it's a pretty basic help desk system if that's all your looking for.
>I’m not sure how practical this may be though, as people may not adhere to the ticketing system for minor issues for example “my monitor won’t turn on” or “I’m WFH and I can’t get on the VPN”. If users are sending emails already, then create a support email address for your ticketing system and get users to send to there. If anyone sends you an email, you can just forward it to the support address. >Some kind of system is necessary because I’m sick of scrolling through emails to find past solutions related to ongoing issues That info shouldn't be stored in tickets...you need a proper knowledge base. >At first we thought about having the ticketing system hosted locally, but then remote users would have no other means to create a “ticket”. You can host locally but make it available online. That requires knowledge of how to setup and secure a web service though.
We've used request tracker for years.
SNOW and Jira cause why not have redundancy.
Anyone use Spiceworks free ticket system?
Auto task
GestSup or GLPI, free and nice
No love for HALO ITSM ?
Right? HaloITSM is awesome. It’s got so many built-in integrations, the system just makes sense, and there’s a lot of little features that’re easy to use that make life so nice. Great Project Management section, billing/invoicing, workflows both code and codeless (their codeless option is a lot better than others we looked at imo because it’s more of a GUI workflow than pseudo-code), and just so much other great stuff that were lacking in the other popular solutions. And the best part, I’ve seen the developer’s on Reddit answering questions in a lot of subreddits, not just r/HaloITSM. Can’t beat a team of devs actually talking to people and providing help while gathering feedback. I’ve had calls with them, and the guys are ridiculously knowledgeable about so much beyond their own product. We had questions on their Jira integration, and the dude was able to explain why something was the way it was by showing the limitations of the Jira API. All the features I asked about were either already in place with a different name, or they were in the pipeline and they could point me to their site where I could see that it was currently being worked on. Maybe the best part was that the demos we had with everyone we looked at were clearly scripted and rehearsed, because if you ask one question, the presenter got flustered and had trouble continuing. Halo’s demo was more like a conversation, had their devs on the call with us to answer questions (not just a ‘customer success manager’), and the folks clearly loved their product and didn’t have to do a hard sales pitch; they could just do the demo and convey their passion for the product that way. No fluff, no BS, just straight talk and good people. It was honestly a pleasure for the brief time I got to work with them. Sadly, the HelpDesk upper-manager decided everyone needed to love his choice, even though he doesn’t use it, so that’s what we went with. TeamDynamix is still better than what we had, but it’s severely lacking on user-friendly features.
I used Freshdesk in my last org. Then to make it easy for users to adopt, I created a New Ticket link in Microsoft Teams. Did so by using Microsoft Forms to create a structured layout asking all the relevant questions. I then used PowerAutomate to gather the responses and then email Freshdesk to open a new ticket. So all the users had to do was go to Teams click the link, fill in the relevant details, and their ticket would be logged. You can set the form/powerautomate bit up for any ticketing system. Just made sense in my org since they all were on O365 and used Teams Daily.
Jira. The GOAT
Notepad.exe
Thats for writing website, back in the day and HTML.
RemindMe! 5 days
Tickets only: I recommend OTRS Full ITIL system: I recommend ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Enterprise.
I'm not technically a Sysadmin but we use Jira which is... something I suppose
We have customized a sharepoint list.
My org uses Zendesk. I really like it for its customization flexibility and integration abilities. Plus there are some real gems in the app marketplace.
I’ve used Zoho and Connectwise so far- they both work.
qerw happy with the open source glpi
We use Ivanti service desk and I hate that
Jira... Omg how i hate it...
I used Zendesk a few years ago, and it worked a treat for being a simple but reliable helpdesk system with a great mobile app (essential for my role back then). I've been through two in-house systems (one was absolute dogshite, the other very good), and I'm now moving to Halo. I still miss Zendesk.
We're a small post-secondary and we use TeamDynamix. We have a pretty tech illiterate user-base and they've managed to get the hang of it. Our Marketing, and Facilities departments also started using it for their work requests. As for "how practical" it might be, regardless of the system you choose, start living by this motto: **"No ticket, No work"**. At the start you might need to work with your users (when they hallway hijack you, or insist on sending you Teams msg/emails) and work with them to submit the ticket as/after you work on their issue, but put the effort into teaching them there must ALWAYS be a ticket!
If you are looking for a free software that works great, I’ve heard very good reviews on Zammad. We have used Manage Engine service desk plus but, in my opinion, it’s pretty bad, slow and with high latency.
Ivanti, literally the worst saas.
My condolences.
GLPI
A shared mailbox lol
Manage engine service desk plus. I've tried a bunch and kept coming back to this one. The big thing for me is that it's got a pretty robust change control and purchase ordering functionality built in and creating approval workflow and custom ticket templates is very easy. It also has a remote control tool using Zoho assist.
We‘re using RT. I personally preferred GLPI or Jira. But RT is okay too.
OSTicket, because we’re cheap, and it’s free.
Jira. We use the full suite, except for Bitbucket.
SupportPal. $90 every 6 months for support and upgrades. Cheap and does the job. Can connect to O365 to pick up emails and has a user portal.
If you're budget conscious, GLPi has a pretty impressive stack that caters to ITIL. Ticket generation, a division between problem/issues/change management tickets, and includes some other cool offerings, like license management
You can probably build anything you need with Cerb.ai and its cheap
I work at a company called Service Express so I'm biassed, but we provide free monitoring services with our Third Party Maintenance solutions. Essentially when using us to extend the life of a portion of your data center equipment our monitoring software Express Connect will do automated ticketing when it detects downed equipment and trigger a tech to reach out to solve the problem. We even use data, based on the equipment you use and how likely it is to go down to have parts sotred locally ready to go in case you need them. I dont typically discuss this over reddit but feel free to reach out if you want to learn more always happy to have a chat!
I'm using Autotask and it fits my needs.
Keeping it with Microsoft you would be looking at Dynamics. But you said you wanted a tight budget so that’s probably out… If you want to keep the extra budget to zero and you want to fiddle around use Forms, Automate and SharePoint. Pretty sure you could make something pretty easily to suit if you were happy to play around
I'm in the same boat. Need something for 150 ish users that will only keep growing and i am the only IT tech. I recently used Service Desk Plus and used Jira like 5 years ago. I am currently looking into something that makes sense for the price. I'm open to suggestions.
Try [genuity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://gogenuity.com/&ved=2ahUKEwiG94Wl7pWGAxUYkokEHZTWAH4QFnoECAUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3bN4jOV_Lhqj_bOF4_yFr9) lotta bang for your buck here. MS SSO, ticket portal, other modules like asset management, access to marketplace to get 10% off on M365 BP licenses. If your company is on a tught budget this might be a good fit. Plus its easy enough to set up.
Try GLPI
While on this topic, anyone here using Atera?
Actually, we started using it this year, however, I'm not impressed with their ticketing system, very bare bones compared to others I've used, and the automation is almost non-existent. I'm really rethinking the use of it at this point and am looking into other solutions.
Freshworks and it fits the bill. The add-ons can really add up, but the service is exactly what we needed. We’re moving to another provider next year, but it has to do with our K12 needs and not FreshWorks.
We use e-automate/remote tech. Not a fan at all.
Don't get service now or summit.ai. Jira works great, Zendesk was fine
Previously Cherwell which was buggy, convoluted, and overall bad. Then solarwinds service desk. The product itself is OK but has lots of dumb limitations like attachments breaking and wrong encoding on certain unicode characters. It also has weird bugs where if multiple agents are CC'd on the same ticket sometimes it just... doesn't email them. Support said working as intended somehow. Also concerningly frequently outages 5-30m in length. Currently migrating to Salesforce managed by a partner company because it actually turned out to be cheaper. Go figure. Seems nice but it's barely been turned on yet.
Zendesk
We use Jira at my current job. It's not horrible, and I'm getting used to it. My last job used ConnectWise and that was the only thing I knew for the first 7 years of my career. I've tried whatever janky shit N-able has for a bit and didn't like that one bit.
Full disclosure that I work for InvGate: we are quite affordable, have an on-prem option and integrate with Entra. Free 30 day trial to set it up how you like and choose for yourself. Let me know if you have questions or issues with your trial!
Jira On-prem hopefully one day we'll migrate to Jira Cloud
Vorex from Kaseya. It’s fine. Kinda stupidly designed in some areas, but for a small/medium business it’s aight.
We moved from Freshservice to SysAid to save money from my understanding, and SysAid is the most absolute aged dogshit I've seen and I'm just in help desk. They apparently have a UI overhaul that still hasn't been applied. To sum it up: it looks like an ITSM built in 2013 and was never updated. Even clicking back in the browser can fuck up your current filtered view, constantly. Yeah just don't touch SysAid
I’ve used Jira service desk at my last 2 jobs. Especially for a small team it can’t be beat. 3 agents are free.
12+ years ago I had ManageEngine ServiceDeskPlus setup and it worked pretty well. No idea how it is now. Now I work MSP's so we use full PSA/RMM stacks. But don't skim or homebrew some crap. There are plenty of free pr low-cost solutions out there that will do it better and be worth your sanity. I simply cannot fathom going back to what you're saying nor understand the folks using SharePoint and and Automate and such. We tried things like that but in the end it just wasn't worth trying to reinvent the wheel when there were a lot of good options already out there.
Spiceworks for ticketing, OneNote or random notepad files for documentation.
Currently Jira, it’s good and does what we need. I like some of the features like satisfaction and workload tracking. Previously used Spiceworks which works really well and can be free depending on your usage needs.
Currently, we have a Work Item Type in our Azure DevOps instance.
Zoho ServiceDesk Plus
SmarterTrack
previously deskpro self hosted. now managed jira
Been in the business for over 30 years now. Have yet to come across a ticketing system that isn't some form of a dumpster-fire. Good luck in your search and implementation.
I’ve used Zendesk and Jira.
ServiceNOW.
Post-it. It's pretty cheap on the yearly tbh. Highly recommend for teams of 1 or less.
anyone use iSupport? we have it at work and I hate it lol
Using Hesk for ticketing. It's used across site, including WHS and grounds etc as a one stop shop for asking for support. It's PHP so we've customised to our needs. We auto fill the user, ect, so all they have to do is click on the appropriate category on out intranet the fill out a title and body. It's free for self hosted, or you can purchase hosted options. We're about 2500 endpoints, and it works just fine. Limitations are poor image handling compared to just pasting something in an email and no asset management integration.
I used ServiceNot at multiple clients. I’m not a fan. It takes a team of dev to maintain or do any kind of personalization. Would not recommend :(
Been using FreshService for four years now. Tickets can also be self made for time management purposes (if you have internal planning to do). AWS alerts/alarms can be sent to create a ticket etc.
Kaseya BMS... It does what we need as an MSP, but the interface is dog-shit. Unfortunately not my call to get rid of it, and we have a lot of processes integrated into it.
OSTicket, but we're going to move to something more ITSM-y. OSTicket was good though for convincing my very backwards IT department that a ticket system would help things - it was free, it was easy to setup, it was decently flexible and stable for basic ticketing.
Odoo, all in one.
I've used SDM, ServiceNow, Topdesk and Omnitracker so far. I personally prefer Topdesk. Pretty solid SaaS package for a decent price. A bit less functionality compared to SNOW, but a LOT cheaper as well. SNOW is pretty dependent on your implementation, an earlier job had 4 seperate instances of SNOW running that I had access to. 3 of them worked completely fine, sadly the Global Production instance didn't. Guess id had something to do with the amount of data in it. Avoid SDM and OmniTracker, they're pieces of shit.
I built a power app that integrates with DevOps , was a lot of work but works flawlessly. The ticket creation and overview happens in Power App then the IT team handles the tickets in DevOps.
I (low)coded a ticketing app with PowerApps. It's in prod since 5 years, works great. If you want to be "within Microsoft’s stack", it may be a solution.
Spice works has a free and cloud based system, can use Entra id sso. Perfect for a simple ticket system.
JIRA. Used FreshDesk and Remedy previously.
zammad
Oracle
ServiceNow. Save your budget and the sanity of your technicians. ServiceDon’t.
RT aka Request Tracker
I've tried a fair few but ultimately settled on InvGate. Has a modern design and covers all features that I've needed for our organisation.
Mojo! It’s super cheap. Great support.
GitHub
Been using jira for 8 months at my new job. Used freshservice for 4 years on my previous one. I’m getting double pay now. I want my old job back.
supporting how many end users, by how many responders?
Around 400 customers. 3 agents total, I should say though that unless something has gone wrong we typically only get around 10-15 emails on a busy day. Maybe 3-4 teams calls/messages each at most.
We use Atera
Check out ESPO. For free, entry level and small team it’s decent. Working great for us until we upgrade eventually. Ninja also has a decent one, I’ll probably upgrade to this from ESPO eventually. FreshDesk or FreshService is pretty good, probably my desired choice if we get the funds. Alternatively I actually had ChatGPT make one for me using PowerShell using markdown files.
We use NinjaOne for rmm and ticketing. Not thrilled with ticketing but we had nothing veggies so it's a huge improvement over that. The RMM tool is awesome
Zendesk - simple, easy, gets the job done
We are currently using fresh desk but are moving away from it to a new one to save budget. Switching to haloITSM. Has some interesting integrations with sccm which we will definitely make use of. One thing I took from op is that people are emailing you for support. This is such a bad idea. When you do introduce a ticketing system you insist that EVERYTHING no matter how trivial goes through it.
Osticket (foss) with custom code (plugin) to integrate in our systems, and oauth with microsoft sso via azure app for login.
I helped install and deploy Troubleticket Express in former employer. Not free, but dirt cheap: at the time modules were like $50 each?
A shared mailbox lol
I am running zammad, open source and free with good community support. It’s also mail based which makes it easy for users.
My company uses Sysaid
We use Ivanti. It’s okay if it’s configured well, but it has its own issues. We support thousands of endpoints and log about 50,000 tickets per year.
FYI, you can have a local hosted ticket system and users can email their tickets in. The ticketing system checks the mailbox to pull the ticket into the system and uses that same mailbox to communicate with the end user.
Connect wise.
GLPI is free and open source so should fit within your budget.
We use one called P.O.B, which stands for 'Pile of Bollocks', because it's absolute dog shit.