Documentation forSolarWinds Service Desk

Service Portal overview

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Introduction

Your SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) service portal is a one-stop shop designed to provide your end users with valuable information and resources to help find answers and resolve issues. Users can view knowledge articles (solutions), submit incidents and service requests, and track the status of previously submitted tickets.

You can fully customize your service portal to provide a look and feel that meets the needs or your organization so your employees know they have reached the correct resource. You can upload your own logo, change titles and messages displayed across the portal, and enable certain fields on the new incident or service request form. You can also provide your users with special instructions.

Service portals can be managed for a single tenant or for multiple service portals for ESM (Enterprise Service Management) customers. See Enterprise Service Management (ESM).

  • Multi-tenant ESM customers manage their primary service portal, which we call the Landing Page, at the organizational level. In addition, each service provider can have their own service portal, which they manage at the service provider level.

Before you begin

Determine whether your company is a single-tenant ITSM customer or a multi-tenant ESM customer.

Navigation

ITSM customers ESM customers
Setup > Global Settings > Service Portal Organization (or Service Provider) > Setup > Global Settings > Landing Page (or Service Portal)

Navigation is dependent on whether the setup is for an organization's service portal or an ESM service provider's service portal. Some settings might be in multiple locations.

Grant access to the portal

Administrators can grant users access to the portal using one of these methods:

  • Create your users in advance and grant them the Requester role, which allows them to use the Service Portal. They will receive an email with activation instructions. Though global settings you can allow users, including non-domain users, to set up their own account.

    All users are created and managed at the Organization level. For customers using ESM, by default every user is a Requester with access to every service provider's portal.

    See Users for instructions on how administrators can create users. See Roles and Permissions for instructions creating roles and granting permissions.

  • Ask your users to join the portal by clicking the Join the portal link on your account's home page.

  • Create users via email. When your users communicate with the service desk via email, a portal user id is automatically created for them. To retrieve their password, they can click No password? on your account's home page.

  • Via single-sign-on. If your account is configured for SSO, you can select to have your user accounts automatically created in your service portal when they log in via SSO.

Setup options

Navigate to the proper setup instructions for your organization:

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