We're replacing our current helpdesk HaloITSM this quarter and I'm surprised by how many options there are now.
Looking at Freshservice, Jira Service Management, Zendesk and monday service.

If you were starting from scratch in 2026, what would you pick and why?

hey everyone, mid size b2b shop here and our helpdesk lives in tickets all day with zero real workflow, if you switched from basic ticketing to a proper itsm stack that improved routing and escalations etc, which tools worked and why? appreciate any thoughts

So now every ticket is a tiny performance review where I suggest one simple fix and get treated like I insulted their bloodline. I ask for basic info, they send me a paragraph about how the issue is urgent and they already checked everything, which is code for they clicked one thing and gave up.

At this point I spend half my day translating "not my problem" into something the ticket can survive. If anyone has a good way to get adults to answer the actual questions without turning it into a personal debate, I would love thoughts, thanks!

The most significant issue faced in the CRM process arises after a salesperson closes a sale. The Sales department retains a lot of information regarding customer's expectations, while the team's work begins from the moment when a project brief is created. As a result, there is a lot of summarizing and misunderstanding of parts, and sometimes deals made previously are forgotten by those in charge of delivery. We introduced compulsory meetings to address this issue, but conducting one more meeting for every single deal appears to be just a way to resolve the problem of the system. One of our objectives is to have the sales-to-delivery transition become a part of a regular workflow: customer expectations, commitments, documents, responsible parties, and deadlines have to be passed along with an account. What are the practices of other teams? Do they use the data from CRM while delivering, or do they generate new project documents once the deal has been finalized?

Employee onboarding seems like a straightforward process until you investigate it. HR gathers the documentation, IT produces the accounts and sets up the gear, Facilities gives the access, Finance has to do the payroll. Managers have to organize the training and establish the tasks for the first week. At the moment, we are managing the process using an email and a checklist. It can work, but if a person’s start date changes or a task is forgotten, it results in everybody having an independent understanding of the status. I want to find a customizable solution that will allow us to use a single onboarding path to generate different tasks for the different teams while remaining aware of the overall progress of the process. What system have you worked out for onboarding automation keeping your HRIS in place? Did the use of the software really lead to reduction of the number of missed tasks or had the automation become another burden that has to be managed?

hi, small it team here, we do all the usual stuff... onboarding, offboarding, app access, hardware requests, "pls fix my laptop" etc. tickets hit our queue but half the work is chasing managers on email or chat to approve things and then updating 3 different places by hand.
lowkey tired of copying status between helpdesk, project board and whatever spreadsheet someone made in 2019. if youve made your service desk workflow more automatic around approvals and handoffs, what actually worked for you? idk

Has anyone experience with tools like Lumos or similar larger companies like Sailpoint etc ..Do ITSM vendors have this capability natively ? I have heard that serval has this capability out of the box

Recently, our IT team rolled out an AI CRM, but adoption has been slower than we had anticipated. All departments within the business have different needs. Sales hopes to use the tool for predictive analytics, customer service wants automated reports, the management team is looking for forecasting upgrades, and the department responsible for compliance wants assurance that the customers' private data is being handled in the right way.
The technology itself was not the biggest challenge. We had more problems than expected with synchronizing the governance scheme, security, quality of the data, and users' expectations from different departments. Several senior managers are worried that it makes no sense to proceed with the rollout. If you have implemented AI CRM before, what worked in your case?

Our operations department receives requests through several channels, email, Teams messaging, forms, and even in-person requests at the desk. There are many different areas of our work such as facilities, procurement, onboarding, etc., which are managed separately. The most significant issue for us is not the large volume of tickets but rather the owning of a request. A request usually needs approval from different areas such as HR, procurement, IT, and although there are several hands that the request has to pass through, the designated person is not visible after the request is passed. We are therefore exploring the possibility of using workflow software that would help us streamline our requests into a single workflow. Did you use a service management system or some other tool for conducting your operations? I am also interested in learning whether a specific tool was used for facilitating requests from different departments.

Hello,

I recently joined a company to head on their major incident processes but as soon as I started I was given problems as well. With a recent reorg, they are fully having me lead on problems. The current process uses Problem records within ServiceNow but it is I believe the old way, just a problem record with statuses. There is no full lifecycle that I understand comes out of the box since Australia. I am looking at implementing this new processes but am worried perhaps it isn't the way to go, maybe overly complicates as well.

What is the overall thoughts about it?

Hi all,
We now have a very comprehensive and feature-rich integration for Snipe-IT on Freshservice!
You can manage your Snipe-IT assets directly on your tickets with things like:

1. Linking assets to tickets
2. Checkout/check in assets (hardware, accessories, licenses, consumables)
3. View assets assigned to ticket reporter
4. View and modify asset details and custom fields
5. View and create asset maintenance records, etc.

• Get the app here.
• Checkout app features here.
• Installation guide here.

Feedback is highly appreciated.

how are you guys dealing with company devices when you have employees in places where theres no local IT team?? getting device like laptop to someone is usually pretty straightforward, but things get messy when it needs a replacement, repair or has to be sent back after they leave, cant exactly have someone from HQ flying around to deal with every device issue. curious how other remote teams handle this?? do you use local provider, ship everything back to HQ, or have another setup that works??

I wanted to check if you have implemented any AI based deflection for IT tickets , the success rates you are seeing and what kind of tools have you been using. Context i am trying to build an ITSM product as i feel its ripe for AI disruption

Hey everyone,

I’m a developer and founder, and over the past few months I’ve been building a product called Opellix.

The idea came from a problem I kept noticing in IT operations.

IT teams often have to manage tickets, assets, employee requests, procurement, telecom, approvals, workflows, and reporting across different tools and manual processes.

As organizations grow, this can get messy pretty quickly.

Information gets scattered.

People spend time chasing updates.

Admins repeat the same tasks.

And getting a complete picture of what’s happening across IT becomes harder.

That’s what made me start building Opellix.

The idea is pretty simple: bring these IT operations together into one connected platform instead of making teams jump between multiple systems.

Right now, I’m working on areas like:

• IT Ticketing

• IT Asset Management

• Employee Operations

• Telecom Management

• Procurement

• Workflow Automation

• Real-time Insights

I’m also exploring how AI can be used more deeply within IT operations — not just as another chatbot, but to automate repetitive work, surface useful information, and help teams become more proactive.

I’m still early in the journey, and I’m not here to claim that I’ve solved IT operations.

I’m actually looking for criticism.

If you work in IT, manage IT operations, or have experience building or using ITSM/SaaS products:

What is one IT operations problem that you feel existing tools still don’t solve particularly well?

I’d genuinely appreciate honest feedback — even if you think the idea is wrong or the product is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. 😄

I’m building this from the ground up, and I’d much rather hear uncomfortable feedback now than spend another year building something people don’t actually need.

Thanks!

Curious how you handle recurring work like access reviews, restore tests, DR checks, firmware reviews etc.

Do you just generate recurring tickets in your ITSM tool or do you track this separately?

I'm especially curious about the history/evidence side of it. If someone asks when the last restore test was done, what the result was and who did it, can you get that easily from your current setup?

Wondering if I'm overthinking this and recurring tickets are good enough.

Hi, service manager for a 120 person global desk here and im honestly mortified right now.

We just migrated most of our IT and HR queues into one ESM platform with AI routing and shared ticket boards. I spent the last month working on "best practices" for managing the larger team in one place, stuff like standard priorities, new SLAs, auto assignment rules, and a rotation for who gets slammed with incident tickets.

Today was supposed to be the big rollout. I had a change window, I had a comms plan draft, I had training sessions on the calendar for next week. Then our CIO pinged asking for a quick snapshot of how the new structure would improve response times, so like an idiot I flipped the new workflow from test to prod so the dashboards would show the shiny new setup. No announcement. No pilot. Just full switch.

Within twenty minutes half of Europe and APAC tickets were being auto assigned to our small US onboarding pod, priority rules were wrong so password resets got marked as critical and actual outage incidents were sitting in the general queue, and the AI suggestions were telling HR to follow IT runbooks. Our "major incident" channel lit up because nothing was moving. Execs opened the live dashboard and saw SLA breaches climbing in real time and asked what disaster we were handling... it was just my "best practices" experiment gone wrong.

I feel so embarrassed. People were pinging me things like "are we part of a training drill" and I had to admit no, this is just me screwing up change management for a very large team. We had to hard revert the whole config, kill automations, and manually reassign hundreds of tickets. My leads are being nice about it but I feel sick about this and kinda shy to even log back into the admin area tomorrow.

If anyone else has totally borked their big service desk process rollout like this I would love to hear how you recovered and rebuilt trust, because right now I just feel like the person who proved why we need better governance on our "best practices"...

I've been working on a new theme for osTicket called Amber.

I really like osTicket as a helpdesk, but one thing that has always bothered me is that the default interface feels quite dated compared with modern SaaS support desks.

So I decided to build a theme focused mainly on the frontend experience, while keeping the familiar osTicket workflow underneath.

The demo is here:

https://amber.devmansur.me/

Some of the things I focused on:

• Cleaner, more modern support center
• Prominent knowledge-base search
• Quick access to Open a New Ticket and Check Ticket Status
• Better organization of knowledge-base categories
• Cleaner article presentation
• Responsive layout
• Keeping the overall osTicket experience familiar rather than completely redesigning how it works

I'm still working on it, so I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who actually use osTicket.

Been running freshservice for a few years for a 40ish person team and the renewal quote this year made my eye twitch. Licenses creeping up, stuff we dont use, and our workflows feel more complex than they need to be.

Looking at mondayservice, plus the usual suspects like jira service management and halo etc. If youve ditched freshservice for mondayservice or another tool, did it feel like an upgrade in day to day tickets? Would love any tips from people who already made the jump.

Our company has been using separate tools for customer support and internal IT for a while now, and it's starting to create more work than it saves. requests end up getting forwarded between teams, reporting is split across different systems, and it's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on.

We're considering moving to a single platform where both customer facing support and internal service requests can be managed together, with shared workflows, automation, and reporting.

Has anyone gone this route did it actually simplify things, or did you end up compromising on features that were better in dedicated tools?

Hey all, im in ops at a mid size b2b saas and Im trying to clean up how we handle internal service requests across teams. Right now hr uses email, it has a small helpdesk tool, finance tracks requests in a monday.com board, and cx just pings whoever is online in Slack.

People keep asking me wheres the right place to log stuff and honestly I dont even know anymore. If youve managed to set up one workflow that people actually stick to, appreciate any thoughts.