Managing Multiple Accounts

A common practice for many organization is to use a single SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) account to manage service delivery. However, at times there are organizational requirements that can benefit from utilizing more than one account.

For example:

1. When you create a separate account to use as a “test" account. There you can test new functionality and/or different settings before enabling them in your Production environment.

2. When you would like to maintain complete separation between accounts for different departments.

   Some organizations prefer to keep HR, IT and Finance as unique entities for security or confidentiality purposes, especially when you are using the service desk platform to deliver services to both internal (employees) and external (customers) service desk audiences.

3. When you allow individuals to access your account and they are already defined in another service desk account (of a different organization). This often occurs with people that are external to your organization such as contractors.

Factors to Consider

Do I want to employ multiple SWSD accounts within my organization?

A single organization can utilize multiple accounts. As long as each user login (email address) is defined in only one of the accounts, simply proceed to Setup.

However, if a user (identified via his/her email address) is used in more than one account, please consider the following:

• Email addresses are used by the SWSD application as unique identifiers. When the same email address is associated with more than one account, there must be a way for the application to identify which account you would like to access.

• While the same email address (user login) can be used in multiple accounts, passwords are unique to each account.

If you determine that your organization requires multiple accounts, note the following guidelines for successful log in into the service desk application:

• Login via a browser: Use your account login URL: https://<account domain name>.samange.com

  • This URL uniquely identifies the account you wish to log into and therefore helps SWSD check your password in relation to the correct account.

• Login via the mobile app: Based on the user ID (email) and password you can login directly into a single account. Once you provide your credentials and select Log In, if your email is linked to more than one account:

  An additional screen appears where you are prompted to enter the name of the account you would like to access. To find your account name, log in via a browser and go to the My Account page.

• Login via API: Use a token for authentication. Tokens are unique in the system therefore, you do not need to provide any additional information to identify the account you want to access. Please click here for more information on tokens for API access.

For security reasons, SWSD will never display the list of accounts your email is associated with.

When attempting to access the SWSD with an email address that is linked to more than one account, there are two error messages you may come across:

• When logging in from a non-unique domain such as ‘app.samanage.com’, the following error message will appear:
  • Incorrect email or password. Please try again
• If API access is attempted without a token, API authentication will fail. Basic/HTTP Digest authentication will not work for multi-account users. This following error message will appear:
  • HTTP 401 (Unauthorized)

Multi-Account Users and Single Sign-On

When using SSO and a single domain name with multiple accounts, you might need to define several applications on the IDaaS side and connect each of the applications to the respective SWSD account. This is similar to working with different application from an IDaaS solution perspective.

Once you have successfully logged in, click here to continue to the Setup up instructions.