IT Service Management Specialization

Resource Guide Version 2

[SolarWinds Sales Experts ITSM Version 2 - 2023

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ITSM Personas

INFLUENCER
Potential Titles:
• Help Desk Technician
• Help Desk Analyst
• Support Technician

Description:
Part of a team that processes help desk tickets and provides IT services to their employees
and organization reports to the help desk manager.
• In larger organizations, they may be part of a support team specializing in certain areas
(e.g., Tier 1 network)
• In smaller organizations, they may be trained to address a more extensive set
of problems and service needs
• As tech-oriented users of different help desks and IT tools, they’re looking for innovative
IT service management (ITSM) solutions designed to be quick and easy to
use/implement

Pain Points:
• Mundane, manual, and repetitive tasks slowing them down
• Using multiple tools and legacy software to provide support, making them inefficient and
slow to respond to users
• Working high ticket volumes, which feels overwhelming—they often find themselves
putting out fires rather than establishing sustainable and scalable ITSM processes
• Rarely getting access to professional training and opportunities to advance their career;
it’s hard to get promoted internally, but they hope to get ahead by working harder and
advocating for their users

Motivations:
• Resolving more tickets, reducing resolution time, and improving employee/customer
satisfaction (CSAT)
• Proactively attempt to step away from their desk to provide a better support experience
with face-to-face interactions
• Taking pride in helping others resolve issues and being an IT hero

DECISION-MAKER
Potential Titles:
• IT Support Manager
• Help Desk Manager
• Sr. IT Manager

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Description:
Responsible for IT support and ensuring employees and users have the tools to do their jobs.
Manages the help desk team and spends most of their time ensuring their team has efficient
processes and meets employee needs.
• They help keep the business running smoothly, but they also provide technical
assistance and support to employees when their team needs them
• In smaller organizations, they do everything from troubleshooting and resolving issues to
tracking IT assets and ensuring their organization has the latest patches and updates
• They report to and interact with the IT leadership team, such as the CIO

Pain Points:
• Resolving more tickets, reducing resolution time, and improving CSAT
• Proactively attempting to step away from their desk to provide a better support
experience with face-to-face interactions
• Taking pride in helping others resolve issues and being an IT hero

Motivations:
• Ensuring their team is maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs), CSAT, and key
performance indicators (KPIs)
• Streamlining and automating service delivery through process improvements and
technology
• Removing barriers for team members and mentoring them on growth opportunities
• Becoming more business savvy by refining their skills and experiences to take the next
step in their career toward a higher-level IT leader
• They care about strategic and more tactical needs in the organization

IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
Potential Titles:
• Director/VP of Support
• Director/VP of IT

Description:
Highly technical, often tactical IT leader. Two general functions may be identical in smaller
companies: IT operations/support and IT infrastructure.
• "X" of infrastructure typically responsible for planning, building, and maintaining
hardware/software infrastructure and keeping it running
• May include cloud/software as a service (SaaS) infrastructure if responsible for hybrid
operations/support
• In a hybrid cloud environment, responsible for interface, provisioning, and
troubleshooting infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and
solutions.

Pain Points:
• Managing increasingly complex and dynamically changing hybrid technology stack
• Aligning process, infrastructure choices, and cost with application owners/lines of
business

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 • Speeding mean time to resolution (MTTR) for application service outages (typically has
a solid handle on infrastructure outage MTTR)
• Proactively preventing application performance outages and slowdowns
• Management reporting on performance and capacity from the application perspective

Motivations:
• Finding and maintaining just enough infrastructure capacity to cost-effectively enable
business success
• Delivering maximum value at minimum risk of failure
• Need simple and quick solutions they can use to achieve value easily
• Standardization of monitoring, management, and prevention processes across the
technology and application stack
• They want solutions built to integrate with existing solutions and require minimal training
or specialized skills

Navigating Conversations with ITSM Personas

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Customer Pain: SolarWinds Service Desk Solution

Top ITSM Use Cases

• Reduce MTTR, Cost, and Complexity
• Automate Processes
• Manage IT Assets
• Measure and Manage SLAs
• Scale Service Delivery
• Increase Agent and Employee Productivity

SolarWinds Service Management

Outcomes

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Offerings Based on Maturity

Qualify the Right Solution via a Propensity to Buy

(PTB) Model

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SolarWinds Service Desk at a Glance
A Complete Service Management Platform

Third-Party Integrations
Enhance your service desk and asset management solution by integrating over 200 cloud
applications.

• SolarWinds Orion Platform

• Dameware Remote Everywhere
• Active Directory
• Amazon Web Service
• Azure Active Directory
• Dropbox
• Google Analytics
• Google Apps
• Google Chrome OS
• Google SSO
• GoToAssist
• Harvest
• Jamf
• Jira
• LogMeIn Central
• LogMeIn Rescue
• Microsoft Azure
• Microsoft SCCM
• NMAP
• Okta
• OneLogin

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 • Open REST APU
• Slack
• TeamViewer
• VMware vCenter
• Zapier
• Zendesk

Better Discovery and Qualifications: Starter Questions

Engaging the IT buying team to firm up the business case for initial investment—one or more
use cases

• What tools are you using for ticketing/ITSM processes? Are you experiencing any gaps in
your current solutions?
• How are employees engaging with you when they have problems and need IT to help?
• Is your ticketing/ITSM solution on-premises? What costs does your tool incur each year?
• Does your tool have IT asset management (ITAM) capabilities? How are you tracking your
BUILD

assets?
• Does your team get bogged down with repetitive tasks? How much time do they spend on
these activities?
• Are you using other SolarWinds solutions, such as SolarWinds ® Platform products or
Dameware® Remote Everywhere? Would you like to learn more about their integrations and
our ticketing/ITSM solution?

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 LAND: Common Objections
OBJECTIONS RECOMMENDED RESPONSES

We offer several package options. You can get started in a lower

We currently need the budget for a solution like
package to support your basic needs, then upgrade to more
this.
functionality when you need it or have the budget available.

In many cases, you get what you pay for—but are you getting what
you truly need? We offer a free 30-day trial to allow you to compare
I already have a free/cheap ticketing solution. your current solution to SolarWinds Service Desk and identify
efficiency gains capable of driving a more significant return on your
service desk investment.
SolarWinds Service Desk can be implemented quickly with intuitive
and configurable setup options designed to meet your business needs.
I don’t have time to take on a project like this.
MOVE

We also offer onboarding packages where a dedicated specialist can

assist you with getting your service desk optimized on time.
SolarWinds Service Desk is built with best-of-breed functionality.
Though it may be missing some bells and whistles, these options can
SolarWinds Service Desk seems to lack some
be costly. Let’s discuss your essential needs from a service desk
customization we’re looking for (mainly larger
solution and show you how to accomplish this with SolarWinds Service
customers).
Desk without the additional time and expenses associated with heavy
customization.
Web Help Desk® isn’t going anywhere, and you aren’t being forced to
What’s happening to WHD? Is it going end of upgrade if you’re satisfied with your current solution. SolarWinds
life, or do I have to upgrade? Service Desk offers additional functionality that may benefit your
organization, and it could make sense to upgrade.

Effective Sales Practices—LAND ITSM

2023 Top Tips for Your SolarWinds Sales Team Peers

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Effective Sales Practices—EXPAND ITSM
2023 Top Tips for Your SolarWinds Sales Team Peers

SolarWinds Vision
Moving Forward with SolarWinds in 2023

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SolarWinds Service Desk Offers Comprehensive Capabilities
Customers Are Looking to Optimize—Ensure They Maximize Investments, Integrations,
and Benefits

SolarWinds Platform
Designed for Customer Needs Regardless of Where They Are in Their Cloud Journey

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SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability and Service Desk
Modernize IT With SolarWinds Service Desk

Integration Benefits:

• Eliminate manual efforts and help agents react faster

• Auto-convert alerts to tickets
• Auto-update alerts in Hybrid Cloud Observability
• Incorporate asset data into ITSM to view and manage the entire infrastructure
• Populate asset configuration data and dependencies into the configuration management database
(CMDB) for change management
• Attach configuration items (CIs) to alert-generated tickets
• Avoid record-keeping issues affecting devices
• Set SLAs on system or service outages

IT and Business Impact:

• Eliminate tool sprawl through integrated full-stack observability and incident management with
actionable intelligence to expedite problem identification and resolution and enable proactive
management across complex and distributed hybrid environments.
• Accelerate issue resolution and ensure SLAs with modern solutions designed to unify data from
across the environment and provide built-in intelligence and actionable insights to help prevent
issues. Elevate your ITIL® processes by leveraging automatic routing, prioritization, and
categorization to convert Hybrid Cloud Observability alerts into incidents in Service Desk. Quickly
understand your connected landscape and identify problems impacting performance.
• Reduce alert fatigue with automated and customizable bidirectional alerts designed to communicate
incident progression between Hybrid Cloud Observability and Service Desk. Leverage custom reports
identifying "problematic" assets that significantly contribute to service interruptions.
• Improve accuracy and maximize agent productivity by automatically recording Hybrid Cloud
Observability assets and associated dependencies in your CMDB to streamline impact analysis and
change management decisions. Link configuration items to incidents and changes for record keeping.
• Make your budget go further with comprehensive visibility across networks, infrastructure, and
applications for intelligent hybrid IT management integrated with an easy-to-use service desk
solution.
• Support your cloud journey with a cloud based ITSM platform fully integrated with observability
solutions designed to support your specific cloud strategy.

Glossary of Terms
AIOps: Artificial intelligence for IT operations. AIOps uses technology such as machine learning to
automate aspects of IT operations. It has several uses, including correlating events, education, and
detecting unusual traffic or behavior on the network. Baselining metrics, capacity planning, and
forecasting are examples already included in Hybrid Cloud Observability and SolarWinds Platform
products.

Anomaly-Based Alerting: A feature powered by SolarWinds Observability designed to consider node or

entity behavior when deciding whether to fire an alert. For example, a server may be very busy at a
particular time of day every day. If a key metric such as memory utilization spikes to exceed an alerting
threshold during this time, an anomaly-based alert wouldn’t fire, as the behavior isn’t anomalous or

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“unusual” for the device. Anomaly-based alerting is an example of machine learning, an aspect of AIOps
in SolarWinds Observability.

Cloud-Connected – Connections between a local network, such as the SolarWinds TUL network, and
cloud services, such as SaaS applications or connections to servers and resources in Azure or Amazon
Web Services. There are different types of cloud connections, such as public and private cloud
connections.

Cloud Vendors: Companies providing cloud services and platforms. Major cloud vendors include
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft® Azure, and Google Cloud Platform™.

Hybrid Cloud Observability – Hybrid Cloud Observability is an on-premises monitoring solution running
on the SolarWinds Platform and providing a diverse range of features for monitoring network and systems
infrastructure. Features included in Hybrid Cloud Observability are based on the 12 legacy Orion Platform
products and deliver effective monitoring and troubleshooting metrics and features under a single, node-
based license. Through additional configurations, Hybrid Cloud Observability can connect to the cloud-
based SolarWinds Observability to support other features, such as anomaly-based alerting.

Hybrid IT: Hybrid IT is where a company uses both on-premises resources and cloud-based services to
support business applications and infrastructure.

ITOM: IT Operations Management (ITOM) is one of the main functions of the Service Operation module
of the ITIL framework. This function is responsible for managing the capacity, performance, and
availability of all the components used in an organization’s IT Infrastructure. The ITIL IT Operations
Management is also responsible for maintaining all the technology infrastructure components. It looks
after all the aspects of applications, services, storage, networking, and connectivity elements used in the
day-to-day operations of an organization.

ITIL: Historically, IT organizations were often focused on software, hardware, and other technology rather
than driven by customer requirements. Against this backdrop, the fundamental idea behind ITIL is that IT
services should be focused on client needs, and organizations explicitly agree on the services to be
delivered to their customers. This should be combined with effective processes and clearly defined
responsibilities for service provision within the IT organization. ITIL®—the IT Infrastructure Library—is the
most widely used approach to managing IT services. The guidance provided in ITIL helps organizations
deliver their services in a customer-focused, quality-driven, and economical way.

Machine Learning: Part of AIOps, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence computer
programming designed to adapt and become more accurate as it’s exposed to more data. The more the
machine learns, the more accurate it becomes, as the system “learns” and adapts to conditions and
situations. Anomaly-based alerting in SolarWinds Observability is an example of machine learning
technology.

Multi-Cloud Deployments: Multi-cloud deployments are when a company uses multiple cloud platforms
or services within its organization. Sometimes, this is done to remove reliance on a single platform. Other
times, it’s done to take advantage of different specialties in different platforms or SaaS services. Products
like Hybrid Cloud Observability aren’t tied to just one vendor, protocol, or technology, making monitoring
systems across other cloud infrastructures very flexible.

Platform: In computer terms, this is an OS vs. an application. The SolarWinds Platform is to Orion
modules as Windows® is to the Office 365® suite. Each example has a similar look and feels across the
apps and a set of shared services between them. The apps are integrated by being on the same platform.

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PerfStack: This is a time-series performance analysis for the entire IT stack (monitored by SolarWinds).
When performance problems occur in IT, the root cause is sometimes apparent. For example, when a
service slows down: is it the application providing the service, the server it is running, a poorly optimized
DB supporting it, a network bottleneck, a disk filling up, etc.? The ability to look at the state of the whole
stack in context at the time the problem occurred is potent, and PerfStack does this.

Private Cloud: Private cloud is a cloud-connected model where the cloud infrastructure accessed is used
only by the organization accessing it, which also typically owns the infrastructure. Company data centers
are a common form of private cloud resources. VMware® uses the analogy that the private cloud is a
house, and the public cloud is an apartment.

Public Cloud: Public cloud is a cloud-connected model available to anyone subscribing to the services.
Popular public cloud infrastructures are vendors like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, which
offer their platforms based on subscriptions. Though the machines you create and use and private and
sensitive data aren’t accessible to subscribers, they use an infrastructure hosting other subscribers.
VMware uses the analogy that the private cloud is a house and the public cloud is an apartment.

SaaS: “Software as a service.” Unlike traditional software, which is bought and installed on individual
computers, SaaS software is accessed online and typically licensed by subscription. SaaS applications
provide the same functionality as locally installed software but remove the cost and overhead of providing
and maintaining a server to host the software locally. Office 365 applications like Outlook ® are SaaS-
based applications. Hybrid Cloud Observability application monitoring can monitor both on-premises and
SaaS applications seamlessly and effectively. SolarWinds Observability is a SaaS solution.

Secure by Design: Secure by Design is a companywide SolarWinds initiative to secure our products and
procedures while still delivering high-quality products and features. Secure by Design involves back-end
work following our new secure build practices while focusing on the tools, techniques, and processes we
use and how we secure our data centers and identities.

SolarWinds Observability: SolarWinds Observability is a subscription-based model of SolarWinds

software running in the cloud. SolarWinds Observability is a SaaS solution and removes the customer’s
responsibility to provide and maintain servers for their SolarWinds deployments. Through additional
configurations, SolarWinds Observability can connect to an on-premises installation of Hybrid Cloud
Observability to monitor devices and provide other features, such as anomaly-based alerting.

WAN: Wide area networks (WANs) connect smaller networks across long distances. A WAN often
contrasts with a local area network (LAN). LANs are networks generally limited to a single building or
small campus. They’re private to a single organization or even person and can be created with relatively
inexpensive equipment. Your home Wi-Fi network is a LAN. The technologies and protocols making
LANs easy to set up don’t scale beyond a certain limited distance or to genuinely massive numbers of
endpoints. Dealing with these scales is the purpose of a WAN: connecting one or more LANs.

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