Documentation forSolarWinds Service Desk

Suggested solutions and draft responses

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Introduction

Currently available for Premier plan customers in the US and EU [EMEA] data centers. Your data center is identified in your Account summary.

SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) uses Generative AI (GenAI) to provide agents with information in incident tickets. Currently, information includes suggested solutions, draft responses, and drafts of ticket summaries.

GenAI searches within your existing SWSD tickets to generate suggestions. The scope of searches is limited to the currently selected tenant account; they are not and cannot be performed across other customer accounts. For ESM customers SWSD searches only within the specific service provider's tickets.

All GenAI suggestions are identified by the Generated by AI icon.

Enable and configure GenAI

Step 1: Enable GenAI

Before you can use GenAI and its features, an organization administrator or an IT administrator must enable it for all users.

  1. Navigate to Setup > Global Settings > GenAI Settings.

  2. Under SolarWinds AI, click Request GenAI.

    By submitting the request, the Machine Learning feature is activated on your company's account. The results are confined to that account, ensuring compliance with the SolarWindsdata security policy.

    ESM customers: When the enable toggle turns green for an organization-level administrator, the feature becomes available in each service provider's Setup menu. Each service provider's administrator can then submit a request to enable GenAI for that service provider. To submit a request, a service provider administrator needs to navigate to Service Provider > Setup > Global Settings > GenAI, and then click Submit Request.

Step 2: Configure GenAI Settings

  1. Wait for Machine Learning to complete. When complete, you can see that SolarWinds AI is available.

  2. Under Incidents, toggle AI Suggested Solution & AI Draft Response to On. Under it you can optionally activate learning mode.

    When you activate learning mode the machine learning process begins. When it concludes the features are available and the administrator receives notifications via the notification bell and email. The enable toggle in global settings also changes to green to show the feature is enabled.

Step 3: Set agent permissions

After enabling GenAI, to allow agents to view auto-generated content for incident tickets, you need to set the permissions. Permissions should be applied at the object level and the setup level.

  1. Navigate to Settings > Users > Roles & Permissions > Service Agent User.

  2. Click Add Permission.

  3. From the Action dropdown, select Manage.

  4. From the Subject field, click to see a list of options. Notice the list is divided into three sections: Objects, Setup, and Gen AI.

    From the list of options:

    • If you select All at the top of the list, GenAI is automatically included.

    • If you wish to exclude GenAI, scroll down the list until you reach the GenAI section and then disable the specific features you wish to exclude.

Suggested solutions and draft responses

Suggested solutions and draft responses can help agents reduce Mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR). Suggested solutions can contain detailed instructions for quicker resolution. By using those suggestions and draft responses, an agent can eliminate the need to search for resources and obtain feedback suggestions for requesters.

  • Suggested solutions initially provide a list of missing ticket information (not provided by the user when the ticket was created) and information the agent can perform to resolve the incident.

    In tickets, suggested solutions appear to the right. You can click the drop-down arrow to see the list of solutions, or a reason why no solutions are generated.

    Here you can see (1) the suggestion was generated by AI and (2) agents can rate the suggestion. The displayed rating is an average but the current agent can add a rating.

  • Draft responses initially include a request for missing ticket information and actions the requester can perform to attempt to resolve the incident. Draft responses appear in a comment.

    As needed, agents can go to the text box and click Generate Response.

    • Resolve AI populates the text box with a draft response, which agents can follow or ignore the suggested solution. They can modify or ignore (delete) draft responses or use them as-is.

    • In some cases the agent may see a pop-up at the top of the screen that reads: Unable to Generate Response. Either no description exists or the ticket was created before AI was enabled.

Agents can modify, ignore (delete), edit, or use as-is all suggested solutions and draft responses.