Enterprise Service Management (ESM)

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Introduction

SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) Enterprise Service Management (ESM) allows greater efficiency and flexibility and enhances current service desk usage by letting you expand from a single service provider (ITSM tenant) to multiple service providers, such as IT, Marketing, Legal, HR, and Facilities. Using an ESM account is the easiest way to manage your different service providers and provide end-users with easy access to service-provider-specific information.

ESM is part of the Advanced and Premier plans.

ESM customers have a single SWSD account, but they set up resources for multiple service providers. Underlying resources are shared among all the providers in the account, but each one is guaranteed privacy and certain configurational customizations.

SWSD before ESM

Non-ITSM use cases are currently supported by using a single tenant, and administrators for that tenant control actions for each department. The IT administrators:

• Use a top-level ticketing category to represent the service provider or they might use a combination of categories to represent different service providers. For example, they might create a category called PTO Request and all tickets using that category would be for HR. They might also create a category called Office Space Request and those tickets would be for Facilities.

• Apply permissions and restrictions to control who can see and work on tickets based on the ticketing categories (and subcategories).

The key challenges with this approach are:

• Flexibility. You lose or partially lose the top-level category to segregate providers.

• Security. IT admins can grant themselves access to non-IT data and it’s difficult to be aware of these changes or block them.

Benefits of using ESM in SWSD

With ESM, you have better data segregation and data privacy. Creating multiple service providers lets you limit what each service provider's end users can see.

If someone opens a ticket with the wrong service provider, that service request or incident ticket can be forwarded to the correct service provider. See Incidents and Service Desk settings for instructions on how to enable this feature.

SolarWinds offers informative videos on ESM.

What's different about working in ITSM (single-tenant) vs. ESM (multi-tenant)

Previously in SWSD ITSM, all service management was managed by one IT team. ESM supports both management of your SWSD foundation and management of the services provided in your organization. Configuration of SWSD global features used across the organization is performed once and is done at the Organization level.

You will automatically have one service provider called IT Service Provider. The IT Service Provider will configure and manage ITSM for your organization. You can also have other service providers that can configure their own unique setups for the services they provide.

For those customers who migrate from a single ITSM service provider to multiple service providers in ESM, navigation is different because some things are managed for the entire company at the Organization level, and some are managed at the service provider level.

Major changes to your account after migration to ESM

• Service Providers. Organization level administrators can create multiple service providers as needed for your organization structure.

• Roles management. Roles are defined and managed at the service provider level. The default role for each service provider is Requester. A service provider administrator can change the default role if needed. Anyone with a Requester role at the Organization level can access any service provider’s portal.

  If a service provider wants to limit access to its portal, the service provider needs to create a new role at the service provider level and limit permissions to the service portal. See Roles and Permissions.

• Resources: shared vs. service provider. Resources that are common to all service providers are managed at the Organization level. Resources that are specific to individual service providers are managed at the Service Provider level. The setup menu is split between Organization and Service Provider to support ESM needs.

• Licenses management.

  • Unique licenses. The Unique Licenses table contains all users who have at least one or more of the user license types (Administrator, Service Agent User, Service Task User).

    Any user who has more than one user license type is included in the All licenses table.

  • All licenses. The All Licenses table contains all users who have at least one or more of the user license types (Administrator, Service Agent User, Service Task User).

• Users & Groups management.

  • Users can only be created and managed at the Organization level. After users are created, they can be viewed and edited at the Service Provider level.

  • Groups can only created and managed at the Organization level. After groups are created, they can be viewed and used at the Service Provider level.

• Login History. Events prior to migration will be seen under the service provider named IT Service Provider. After migration to ESM the login history will be updated at the Organization level.

• Virtual Agent. The end user experience in the Virtual Agent is slightly different if the user opens the Agent from the Organization landing page in the Virtual Agent. The first question the Virtual Agent asks is which service provider the end user needs help from. After that, end-user options are the same. If the user opens the Agent from a Service Provider portal, the Agent asks the user a question about what task to perform.

  At any time, an ESM end user can switch to a different service provider.

Migrate your current ITSM account to ESM

Read the migration instructions at ESM migration.

After the migration is complete

After the migration from your current account (ITSM single provider) to an ESM account (multiple providers), you will see two levels: Organization and Service Providers.

You can see a dropdown list containing your new IT Service Provider. It represents your ITSM legacy account.

From the dropdown list you can also switch to or from the Organization.

As your Organization administrators create new service providers, those providers will also display in the dropdown list.

Related topics

• ESM service providers
• ESM migration