SysAid Reviews

My company is an airline and my IT department uses it. For example, an IT request will come under the house subtype. It is all under one system, but we have subtypes, where subtypes are called: 

• "Incidents" that go to the IT department.
• "Requests" that go to the HR department.
• "Complete" that go to the facility management department.

I am in IT. So, if staff needs assistance, we have three types of forms that they can do: 

1. They can call in, then the administrator will create the certificate. 
2. There is a client that is installed on most machines, where they can generate their own certificate and IT will respond to it. 
3. They can send an email to SysAid, which will automatically generate a ticket.

Afterward, as the administrator, I will assign it to the relevant personnel to do the action. That is how it's done in IT. 

It improves IT with its tickets. The IT team became more efficient at how we respond to the needs of clientele. With the last ticket that was created, we previously had no way to track responses. Now, if there is a same-day activity assigned to an engineer, then the engineer has 24 hours to resolve the ticket. Because of SysAid, the responsibility is placed on the administrator who keeps track of the customer incident. It also helps with putting the onus on the engineer to actually close the ticket. Because if an engineer has a ticket that is overdue, it's assigned a flag and escalated. Once it's escalated in the system, it goes up to Tier 2. With Tier 2, we have to know why it was escalated. The engineer would need to have a good reason why it wasn't resolved or it had to be escalated. Therefore, it increases the efficiency of technicians and departments. Because it's in the system, managers may generate potential solutions too.

It tracks everything that the technicians are doing. We can account for time and manage resources.

Most valuable is the reporting aspect of it. What happened was that we grew and expanded the airline. Because of that, there is more demand on the IT system, infrastructure, and resources. SysAid allows us to quantify and fortify our performance. At any point in time, I can generate a report based on a time frame. We can drill down on which categories have the most calls. For instance, if the monitor is not coming on, then we can drill down on that. We could use that information to find out why it is that we have so many tickets based on monitor failing. It can also allow us to be proactive.

Next feature, which we're exploring right now, is launching something called Automate Joe. They launched it late last year. With Automate Joe, we are planning to using account unlock profile in the near future, which will allow us to use SysAid to reset passwords and unlock accounts. This will help on the amount of time that we spend doing this task, because anyone here can get 10 to 15 requests to reset passwords or unlock accounts. Those 10 to 15 calls will probably take like two or three minutes each to start creating a ticket. Altogether, this is about two hours just to do a minor task, which is would be eliminated with just the Automate Joe feature.

The administrative side of the user interface could be a little more user-friendly. It is easier for me to export our reports into Excel, then do a server retrieval and get the information. Whereas, to do a report, you have to go through a configuration type of process, which is kind of difficult and complicated. I have been using this solution for two years now and I still haven't gotten the hang of the reports. We did have a forum about a month ago, and they wanted to tie in how reports were generated. I think they are doing that now.

It is cumbersome to provide customers a report. They could make it a bit easier, e.g., the same way that I can export the source data into Excel sheets. Because each ticket has categories or columns, I should be able to process that monthly data, then simply press on which feeds I want and pull stuff for that. That might be easier to do instead of the customizing which is going on with this interface. 

If you have IT hardware and IT networks, the reporting is set up to report each one individually, but combining them is kind of difficult. However, it is manageable and improving.

When it comes to learning the application, it's complex. There are a lot of functionalities. The only training that they offer is a help option, where there is a document with multiple chapters. You can read it, but it is a lot to look at. We have spoken to them about training, but they don't do one-on-one. They only do in-class training for groups. However, for my company's personnel, you don't need to train a group. You just need to train one person. 

We just want to have some type of online training, not classroom training. For example, I did ITIL training online, which was not interactive. It has videos that I could go through, learn from, take exams and pass. I go through these all the time. I would like SysAid to improve on this help aspect and ideally be more flexible.

Two years.

SysAid is one of the best performing applications at my company. It is very robust.

We recently upgraded. We had no hiccups nor downtime.

It does scale well. The application is designed for company growth. Rather than having SysAid catch up to what you want, you have to catch up to all the features that SysAid offers.

The solution provides us with multi-layered service management along with all our support pieces integrated in one system. Our entire system is run on SysAid, from Tier 1 to Tier 3. All the other IT department functionality is captured in SysAid, like development, warehousing, and application. So, it has vertical and horizontal coverage.

We have two head offices with more than 10,000 staff members who all have access to SysAid, though not all them use it.

I have used the technical support on numerous occasions. They are really good. I am impressed. When I have had a major issue, I have relayed it to them, then it took them about a week to resolve it. However, the problem, which I did wrong on my end, caused a lot of issues, and their response was good. I really appreciated how they dealt with it. They had two teams working on it with two contact people, and I was always kept in the loop. They took a week to bring it back to what I needed it to be. In the interim, they found a solution that allowed me to continue working and still found the correct solution.

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup is complex because there were a lot of back-end configurations that needed to be adjusted. We are a medium-sized company, working on so many different things, and we had to configure each end end user. Then, we had to create our templates and configure each request. Though, there are some things you could do before the template. 

I don't think anybody in the company could just take over. It's something that has to be guided by SysAid.

If you are going to use SysAid, you really need SysAid reps to come in and take a look at the company to see what you want. They can judge the best use and configuration of SysAid.

We have seen ROI. The company has grown over these last two years. The only way we could have managed that growth was by having an application like SysAid.

Everyone is accountable to the company. For instance, everybody has their method. Our CIO's method is numbers. He needs to see numbers to justify the usage that he makes. The numbers that it allows us to capture help him to make proposals to the CEO. Otherwise, he can't really justify why we need more staff or whatever decisions/questions he puts through. SysAid is a great help with this. Without it, we can't quantify or codify anything that we do.

Once you're interested, talk with SysAid. You can have them come in and look at your company and advise you on the best solution. They will tell you what comes with each separate package and also advise you what application to activate. If you want something that they don't have, they have a department that can design something based on your unique requests.

They have explored other solutions, but always stuck with SysAid.

Once you implement a system like SysAid, it changes IT and pushes the business and goods forward. If you work at an older company, you will have people with a seasoned mentality. It is to be expected that you will have to get everybody onboard with the new technology. This is why we still take calls, and we shouldn't be taking calls. A person should be telling them to do tickets because tickets have kept us on track. However, because we have newer and older mentalities, the people with the older mentality will always try to do a call, so we accommodate that. We really need to move away from that and keep it strictly emails and tickets, since emails go straight into tickets and tickets go straight into the system.

We have the client-side interface that looks at our data. It has no big graphics nor fancy graphics. It's a straightforward interface, which is fine.

They have a lot of integrated applications, like TeamViewer, built into their platform. 

There are a lot of other features that we will explore because we are growing now. We are now taking the time to see what SysAid offers. We are looking to have some of the features that we have in other third-party platforms, like remote control and asset management, into SysAid under one platform. This will make it easier to manage, generate reports, and integrate. 

We can't automate yet in our current version because we don't have the password reset and password unlock. We are thinking of getting this. 

I would rate them a nine out of 10. If they make the reporting easier, then I would give them a 10.

We use SysAid for all of our internal user requests from all departments, from all areas or offices for the whole IT Department as well as for finance and for marketing. Any user request will go through SysAid to be dealt with. 

We are on the latest version. We are just about to upgrade to the full version where you have access to the newest features. 

After we introduced SysAid, especially in the back office team in IT where we started with it, we had the option to report the workload of the team. We increased the team afterward because we could see and prove the workload of every single member. Additionally, we implemented SLAs. It's open to everyone. When you request or send a request and we have an SLA based on it, then we can see the status of the ticket, who's working on it, how it is against the SLA, if we are within the SLAs, or if we are above the SLAs. That's from an end-user point of view. 

Additionally, the admin point of view or my point of view is with the reporting function to see where we have SLAs and to see if they are or aren't working and where we need to improve. We can see who is taking the most time to close a ticket and if we then need training improvement. 

The automation capabilities save us time. Before, whenever we had to set up any database systems, any new clients, or any new suppliers we work with, we got an email. Everything was typed manually from the requesting user. Everything had to be then done by copy and paste into the right systems and then write back that it's done or that it's not done. Now, with automation, an end-user is created as a new lead in the CRM. This gets automated into the database and creates a ticket in the system so that we can check or double-check. That's it. That saves quite a lot of time and is a resource system.

On a weekly basis, we save between five and eight hours per team. We need to get more done with what we are working on together with the SysAid implementation team. This will then save even more time.

The self-service portal for the users as well as the reporting functionalities in SysAid to report any requests and tickets coming in are the most valuable features. Overall, the whole workflow system, how it works, the setup, how you can integrate it into other applications is valuable.

I find the self-service portal valuable because if a user wants to enter the ticket and start typing in, they will already get suggestions about how to resolve the issue, which is very helpful and reduces the number of requests. 

In regards to the workflow on the ticketing system, it's absolutely flexible. You can integrate it everywhere. You can use it everywhere. It's very easy for every end-user. Reporting functionalities, especially for me, as I am leading the department to see how the workload of the different members in my department is, where we get more requests, and where we get fewer requests. I can see the workload and I see which departments we get more requests from.

The service desk automation and orchestration are very good. We are implementing it at the moment. We implemented it for two of our applications already for our CRM. Whenever there's a change in the CRM, it will automate them into SysAid as well. We have two workflows from our CRM into SysAid, which is very helpful. Overall, we're very happy with the workflow.

From the admin side, the user interface is easy to use. There is a good overview. It's quick to deal with to get your requests and to deal with them, to change the status and work on them. From an end-user perspective, it's easy to create the ticket. You log in with a single sign-on. You don't need to log in or type in your login details. When you start to type in your ticket, you already get the self-service options to resolve it. If not, then with the categories, you get directly to the right person who will then come back to you very quickly. That's how I see it from an end-user and from an admin perspective.

SysAid provides us with multilayered service management and all of our support pieces integrated into one system. Our service and support systems are much more transparent for everyone in the business to see what the support function is doing and how they're doing to gain even more understanding and recognition. Secondly, having one system for all support operations, helps us to deal with resources and we can swap resources quite easily if we notice that we are behind or we have a higher workload than on others. It makes us more flexible and more transparent.

We had quite a few requests in the past that were taken care of with the latest version that we're implementing at the moment. There are not so many left.

On the old version we only had the option to introduce one helpdesk email address, so weÍ couldn't have more email addresses for various departments, IT and marketing, and finance, it was one email address. Now, we can add more. With the workflows and automation, weÍ can integrate into even more applications but we are on the implementation phase at the moment. 

So far, we're very happy with the new integration. The only thing that I would like to see is for them to improve asset management so that it's more usable. We looked at it once and we didn't find it quite usable for us. That's why we didn't use it. We haven't looked into the new one yet but the asset management is something that can be improved even more and patch management is not as good as it could be.

We started to do introduce the free version in 2014 so we've been using it for roughly six years. 

It's absolutely stable. We have no issues.

Scalability is very easy. It's very easy to scale in regards to scaling up with more administrators and so on. It's very easy. If you want to add more assets, it's one email and it's just an amended license. There is no issue with anything in regards to scalability from growing. When we started with SysAid I was the only one working on SysAid. Since then, we are now 30 people working on SysAid. The scalability from one to 30 happened without any problems.

The majority of the users are from the IT department and there are a few from finance and marketing. At the moment, we have 30 administrators and we have 18 from IT, seven from finance, and five from marketing.

The quality of the support depends. I would give the first level of support a three out of five (on a scale from 1-5, with one being the best). The second level of support would get a one out of five. The professional services are amazing. They know the system. They find solutions for whatever you want to implement that are easy and quick.

We are absolutely happy with the second level of support but not so happy with the first level. It depends on the agent that you get.

The initial setup was quite complex and when we started we started with the free version as a test. It was a trial. Over the months and years, we noticed that there are quite a few things that were not really thought through at the beginning, from our side. This means we had to redo or find a workaround to work with on the actual version. When you use the free version, there aren't many guidelines in regards to the various modules, how to set them up, and what's the thought behind it to set them up the right way. It's a bit of a learning process and you get used to it over the years. You will figure out what you did wrong in the beginning because you were not aware.

The overall setup itself is quite easy and straightforward. There is nothing that is an issue.

The deployment itself took us two to three days. It was more of a setup to get everything set up in the right way. Currently, it was a test system. I was working on my own on these apart from dealing with all other requests for the time being. It took me a few months to get it implemented. This was due to the additional workload. If you really concentrate on it and work on it, then I would say, it takes you two to three weeks to set up.

Our strategy was to monitor the workload of the IT department because we had the impression that the staff was overwhelmed by the workload, but we couldn't monitor it and we couldn't prove it. Then we wanted more end-user transparency to show them that a request they worked on is finished. The ticket is either closed or we have to deal with it with an external supplier.

I did the deployment myself. We didn't use the professional service. We use it now for the new implementation because we learned what we did wrong at the beginning.

If you want to implement it the right way and understand the thinking around it and all the details, then you should use the professional services we implemented in order to have it right from the beginning.

In terms of ROI, on one side, we have fewer people than we would have seen on the other side. It's not a real return of investment. It's more a return of acknowledgment in the whole business to have more transparency and more trust in the support functions. It's not a real return of investment but it helps you to get people more satisfied and get staff more satisfied with it. There is no monetary return on investment but we reduced headcount by two people. 

The pricing is really not expensive compared to other solutions and what you get out of the licenses in regards to how many licenses. You can easily upgrade the license number for the administrators. I would start with a small number and grow whenever needed and not get a huge package already at the beginning.

You have unlimited end-users. There's licensing for assets, reporting, and for administrators. but you can add on whatever you want.

You have to contact the salesperson. It's only an email. You get the offer back. As soon as it's paid, then you get the license key and implement the license key and that's it.

The system is there already. Just free up additional functionalities or additional administrators with the different license keys.

We did evaluate other solutions but we decided to go for SysAid as it was the easiest to implement and in the beginning, it was the cheapest. We could implement it on-premise, we could already implement all of our email systems so we can use all our internal email systems from the very beginning. It was easy to set up for the initial test use. 

We haven't seen money savings via automation capabilities yet but going forward, as we are introducing it at the moment and as we are in these circumstances with the pandemic and with tourism, we will have a smaller team. We will be able to do the same work with a smaller team. We will have savings going forward with the automation, which we need to have implemented. 

With the openness and transparency, the first thing I learned was, people are really looking into it and you need to be up-to-date with the system. It has nothing if you have tickets and you don't have to change any stages or you just deal with it. It has to be transparent and used. You need to get used to it. You need to bring down barriers from departments that should use SysAid with every ticketing system. It takes them more time to send the ticket than picking up a phone or just dropping an email. On the other side, they have the transparency and the knowledge where the ticket is. 

I would rate SysAid an eight out of ten. 

We use it for incident management and service request management. We use it for the Knowledge Base and we also use it for equipment inventory, the CMDB. Those were the key pieces that we needed to bring together in our organization and we wanted a tool that would integrate those key points.

We are using the cloud version. We don't have the client onsite version.

When we have a new member of our IT organization, SysAid has had a good impact for us because we are able to spend minimal time training that person on the system. It's very easy to add somebody on the administration side and to set them up so that they have the access and groups that they need. The amount of work there is very minimal. I don't have to spend a lot of time doing that. And once they are part of our organization and are exposed to the tool, the time needed to pick it up and start working in the tool, in all aspects, is very minimal, which is good. That's a big plus for this tool.

Also, the reporting automation is definitely a time-saver because I can set things to run and then I don't have to worry about them unless I need to change a parameter of a report.

One of the things we're looking at, which I believe will save us time, is the task feature. With it we can generate tasks off one master ticket and that will be automated so it will save time and the effort of having to make sure that all the right areas within our organization are aware of a particular ticket and that they do the tasks they need to do. That automation is definitely a time-saver.

Another feature we use when we're loading our inventory into our CMDB — it's not really automation — is the fact that you can load mass lists of inventory at one time. You don't have to generate single records and that is a time saver. 

Within our system we have a series of notifications and email rules which would be considered automation within the system. We're able to keep our master ticket queue, where everything comes in, clean. Depending on certain types that come in, we don't necessarily need to look at them, or we can route them directly to a given area without intervention. We do save time with that as well.

It depends on what we are working on, but overall, SysAid saves us one to two hours a week.

In terms of having to hire extra people, it hasn't saved me there, but it has allowed me to free up my techs' time to be able to focus on other things. So in a roundabout way, it has had some impact on headcount because they're able to concentrate on other activities rather than spending time doing tasks that are not automated.

Another part of the cost savings for us is that I don't have to consume part of a resource, outside of myself, to do the administration of the tool. It is very intuitive. They do provide you Professional Services to teach you and get you up to speed, but once you have all that, the administration is not a big ask on my time. The flexibility to be able to change things and do things, from my end, in a quick manner, is a cost savings. Overall the administrative side does save you costs in terms of resources and time. And the fact that you don't have to buy other tools to supplement what you may want to do — you don't have to buy a new Knowledge Base because that's in there already — is definitely a cost savings from an IT perspective.

All the features are valuable. They all play a role in our overall support model.

What was important to us was that we could track incidents and service requests separately, and not in a complicated manner. That definition represents a workflow and a work time for us.

The Knowledge Base was key in our support model because it is a way of sharing information across our organization, Ross IT. It represented not only a centralized point to collect that information, but it was about having that information so you're not constantly doing the same issue or request over and over again; you have that documented.

The CMDB has been just as valuable in its own way because we had an in-house-built, legacy system of inventory, but prior to my arrival at Ross, the information wasn't very accurate. Having the assets tracked within SysAid allows us to not only put a more robust process in place to track our inventory, but the relationship function within SysAid, from CIs (configuration items) to customers to the database, allows you to know what assets or CIs your customers have when providing support for them. We haven't gotten to that point yet because we're in the last phase of putting all our assets in the database. But once we have finished that, we're really going to turn on the relationships and that's going to give us an even clearer path around our support for our customers.

Also, the service desk orchestration, overall, is good. It allows an organization to build that service desk concept into its organizational and support strategy. And it allows an organization to digest that and create a support model very quickly around the tools. The fact that the tools are integrated within the system itself gives the organization a really robust way to integrate everything and have a complete support model. 

The other aspect that we use as is the reporting function. It's fairly good. I'd like to see some growth in that area over time. But for an organization just starting out and building that complete service desk model and the components behind it, it's a good start. The reporting lets you complete your circle because it has a lot of ready reports that, in most cases and for most organizations, would hit the main things you would want. You don't have to write them, so that's really nice. If you've had any type of reporting responsibilities in your background, learning how to write reports in this particular tool is fairly easy to pick up. You can be generating those reports very quickly. 

There is also a good scheduling feature, which is nice because you can automate a lot of that.

The Knowledge Base would be another area where I would look for growth in SysAid. It is very much a text-based article system, or you can do attachments. But I'd like to see it grow so that it is more graphical and has some additional tracking features. The Knowledge Base is a simple text editor. I'd like to have more formatting and be able to use more visual elements within the tool.

One of the features that I'm hoping comes at some point is that currently you can only have one Knowledge Base instance within it. For me, it would be beneficial to have multiple instances for different purposes. I'd like to have a completely separate one for customers and the only way I can achieve that right now, where I can tag articles to only be viewed by customers, would be if I use its portal function. The portal function is not a function, at this time, that my organization would have any need to turn on. Because of that, I'm limited. I can't directly expose articles to customers. I'd like to see a little bit more development in that area where you're able to have segmentation of knowledge. 

The other aspect that I'd like to see is that, in the Knowledge Base and in the CMDB, I can't run reports into those entities. I can do it from the incidents and requests — and problem management, but we don't use that. So for the Knowledge Base and CMDB, I have to go into the dashboard for each one of those and use filters to get to the information that I want, and then I can export it. A nice feature and growth opportunity for SysAid would be to develop the reporting tool and link reporting capabilities to all the aspects within the total solution.

We have been using SysAid for about three years now.

It has a good interface. When I was out looking for possible tools for us to use, what was very important to me, in our organizational organization's case, was having it be simplistic and not complicated. We were able to spin up everything very quickly. Our IT support staff took to it right away so there was very little training needed. Putting the pieces together to turn it on and make it live involved minimal work. What I like about the tool is that you can manage different aspects of your organization from a service-management perspective, but it's not overly complicated and that's a good thing. For us it works very well.

The setup was pretty straightforward. SysAid's professional staff did a really good job of helping us understand how the tool works and what was important to consider as we were setting the tool up. Once we had that knowledge, it was pretty straightforward to do and maintain. It works very well.

For maintenance of SysAid I do the front-end administration and my team of three system admins does the back-end infrastructure stuff because we link to LDAP for users and the like. It's one system admin function and that's a very small part of their overall responsibilities. For us, maintenance is not a big investment.

One of the factors that, when I was first looking at tools, made SysAid attractive was the initial cost for bringing the system in. I found it to be very reasonable and very appropriate for what you got with the tool. The standard stuff that initially comes with it was a really good base. That meant I didn't have to add a lot of things. It was a good value. That was very important to me in deciding what tool we were going to use.

Overall, the price is good. It's all about what you get for the base amount. From my perspective, you want to look at what you're getting out-of-the-box. SysAid does a good job of putting key stuff in the box for you. 

You get X amount of initial administrator's licenses. Each person who has to use the system in some capacity on the tech side needs an administrator's license. You have to take that into consideration in terms of your costs as you grow. 

We have also added the TeamViewer integration so we can remote to a customer's desk through SysAid. We've done that because it's integrated within the tool and we can do some tracking of things. 

You really have to decide what's important to you: What you're going to do in the immediate scope of your environment and does SysAid bring that as part of the out-of-the-box functionality, and what things you might have to add as a result of that.

If you have a service management strategy and model of support, that integration of key elements that are important to your organization — whether it's incidents or service requests or problem management or asset management or a CMDB database — becomes very important. The fact that they're all in this one tool is a nice thing to have, both in terms of functionality and cost.

We don't use the asset management. We use the CMDB for our inventory and we went to that because the barcode scanner app currently only functions with the CMDB. I made the decision to use the CMDB in the capacity of tracking our inventory because once we get our inventory in, I want my techs to have a quick, easy, and efficient way to scan an asset to make sure it's in the database. If I used the asset management system in that capacity, I would have lost that functionality.

Overall, I would give the product about a nine out of 10. It brings a lot to the table. It is a very simplistic system in a very good way. There are definitely some growth opportunities for it and I'm excited to see how they'll grow the tool. Overall it is a good solution for our purposes as a mid-sized college, the school of business, within the university. It's a good solution for a small or mid-sized organization that wants to create a support model using an integrated tool. It fits the bill really well.

My primary use case for this solution is to manage the facility services and the IT services in a higher education organisation. After evaluating other solutions and referring to the success story in the home university, the SysAid came out to the best for my needs. 

SysAid provides a unified queue to manage everything of IT service desk, such as all incidents, requests, changes, problems, projects. Not only does each IT staff explicitly conduct the assigned tasks to themselves, but the whole team have a better understanding of how to collaborate. It is very easy to prioritise different events or requests and make us deal with our daily job more efficiently. The system has improved our average resolving time for our customers.

I find the most valuable feature is that I can customize according to my needs. I can change nearly everything within the system from the front-end to the back-end of the integration to the managers. These fields you display to our end users, they will see the different categories. Also, there are columns on the online form when they submit an instance or request. I can customize all of this.

Through the BI Analytics module in SysAid, I can quickly gain insights into daily operation. Although the system can monitor each IT staff's performance, more importantly, it shows vital points for intervention in the matter of service quality.

The module of Knowledgebase should be definitely improved in the consideration of the impossibility of referring an article to a ticket. Also, the vendor should consider improving the obsolete admin portal. 

Running data on this system is very stable. We also get this system on the cloud, so we do not have to set up a server in our data centre. 

I have not experienced issues with scalability. We have about 700 users using this system, which includes all students and staff members. 

Tech support is very efficient. We have a contract with the tech support team. We always receive a response within three hours of our request. They provide 24/7 support. 

We previously used an open-source solution called Spiceworks. It is good for managing only one service desk, but cannot work for multiple service teams in a different business area. 

The SysAid team provided excellent service to implement the solution for us. From the very first day, we received an account manager, and a project manager, to implement the product. They continued to inquire about our business needs and then finalized the best path for us. They were patient and answered all of our questions. With this process, we could easily become familiar with SysAid and use it in a steady approach. I would give it five out of five stars for this service alone!

The solution was implemented by SysAid team. 

The pricing of SysAid is less than its competitors. Our licensing agreement is a good one. We received a nice discount.

We looked at SupportWorks, Service Now and Remedy, but we went with SysAid. We noticed a huge price difference between those solutions and SysAid.

This system is quite powerful, but there is a learning curve for administrators.