Documentation forSolarWinds Service Desk

SolarWinds Service Desk October 2023 release notes

Release date: October 29, 2023
Updated: January 2, 2024

These release notes describe the new features and improvements in SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD). In addition, they provide information about upgrades and detailed workarounds for known issues.

If you are looking for earlier release notes for SWSD, see previous release notes.

New features

  • Dynamic approvers. For workflows in service catalog objects, you can create approval processes that rely on the relationships of roles, rather than the names of individuals. You can also configure a setting that tells SWSD to automatically approve any workflow step where an approver is missing.

    For information on prerequisites and setup, see Dynamic approvers.

  • Automatic approval process voting for unreachable approvers. You can enable the Approvers are unidentified feature to move approval workflow processes forward even when an approver is unavailable.

    Previously, approval processes would get stuck if an approver was unavailable. When the toggle for unidentified approvers is set to Off, SWSD the process does not move forward unless there is another approver on the approval. When the setting is toggled to On, SWSD automatically sets the unavailable person's vote to Approve.

    See Automatic approvals for unreachable approvers for more information on where to configure this feature.

  • Hide the call-to-action button in the {{main}} component of email notifications. SolarWinds has added a new email variable named {{main_wo_action}}. Customers who want their users to receive email notifications and want their users to respond via email only (not through buttons or links that lead to the platform's portal or web application) can hide the call-to-action button in email notifications using this email variable. See Email customization for notifications and Email notification templates.

  • Allow a time tracking entry without a comment You can allow agents to enter time spent working an incident without requiring them to add a comment. See Time Tracking Comments.

  • New configuration option in subnet connections. You can now configure a specific subnet IP address or specify an IP range. See Subnet configuration and Discovery connections.

  • Create custom filters for custom forms index page. You can now filter the Custom forms index page by creating your own custom filters. See Custom forms for available fields, and List view for instructions on customizing a filter, view, or sorting.

  • Discovery agent update failure notification. You can opt to send specified recipients a weekly report of Discovery agents on Windows computers that failed to auto-update. The notification is sent if the install failed after 7 days. For more information, see Discovery Agent Install Failure Summary.

  • SWSD now supports alerts from the Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) AlertStack feature. AlertStack correlates alerts, events, and other problems on monitored entities, and visualizes them to identify the root cause of issues and resolve them. See SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability 2023.4 Release Notesand SolarWinds Platform AlertStack.

  • Renamed Networked Devices index table and navigation to Network Devices. The table was renamed to clarify that the Network Devices table contains all hardware devices that can be connected to the network. Device types include access points, bridges, computers, controllers, phones, load balancers, mobile devices, printers, routers, switches, and others.

Fixed issues

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  Description

Limit on comments. Users were previously unaware when comments submitted via email exceeded the limit of 500. Now, when the number of comments submitted exceeds the limit, a comment is added that states: “Maximum comment limit (500) reached. Any email sent to the incident will be disregarded, and no new comments can be added.” In addition, the Post button is greyed out to prevent additional attempts to add comments.

Legal notices

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