Migration Playbook

LiveAgent SolarWinds Service Desk

LiveAgent to SolarWinds Service Desk: The Complete Migration Playbook

A 39-step runbook across six phases — track your progress, and open the right tool at every step.

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TL;DR

Extract LiveAgent data via API v3 (180 req/min limit), transform to SWSD's ITIL schema, load users first via the Samanage API, then incidents with comments — strict order prevents broken relationships.

Migrating from LiveAgent to SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) is a structural migration between fundamentally different platform paradigms: LiveAgent is a flat, ticket-centric multi-channel customer support platform, while SWSD is an ITIL-aligned IT service management system organized around incidents, problems, changes, users, and a CMDB. There is no native direct migration path supported by either vendor for this specific source-to-target combination, and third-party tooling rarely supports SWSD as a migration target due to its ITSM complexity. Every LiveAgent object — tickets, contacts, companies, agents, tags, and knowledge base articles — requires deliberate schema mapping to SWSD equivalents such as incidents, users, departments, groups, categories, and solutions. Custom work is required to rebuild automations, SLA rules, chat widgets, and IVR configurations, none of which can be migrated programmatically.

Read this first

Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.

Before you commit

LiveAgent is a multi-channel customer support platform with ticketing, live chat, and knowledge base. SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) is an ITIL-based ITSM platform with incidents, problems, changes, CMDB, and asset management. This is not a like-for-like swap — you are mapping a customer-facing support model into an IT service management framework. Every object, field, and relationship requires deliberate mapping decisions.

Critical constraint

SWSD incidents require a registered requester_email on create. All contacts must be loaded as SWSD users before you create any incidents. Violating this order results in API errors on every incident creation call. LiveAgent allows contacts to exist with minimal data, but SWSD requires structured user profiles — ensure all LiveAgent contacts have valid email addresses before extraction. Contacts without email addresses must be assigned to a fallback "Legacy Migration User" (see Edge Cases).

Throughput math

At 180 req/min from LiveAgent with 50 tickets per page, you extract metadata for ~9,000 tickets per minute. But individual message retrieval requires one additional call per ticket, cutting effective throughput to ~90 tickets/min (metadata + messages). For 100K tickets, extraction alone takes ~18.5 hours minimum. Factor in attachment downloads and the total extraction phase for a 100K-ticket account can exceed 24 hours.

The runbook

Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.

01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off. 0/5

Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.

  1. Pull the real numbers out of LiveAgent

    Support ops 1 day

    Export counts for tickets (open and closed separately), contacts, organisations, attachments, macros, triggers, automations, views and SLA policies. Note the oldest ticket date — history depth drives the whole timeline. Estimating from memory is the single most common cause of a blown migration window.

    Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory
  2. Decide what history actually moves

    Support lead 2 days

    Agree a cut-off with the support lead: all history, last 24 months, or open tickets plus a read-only archive. Every extra year of closed tickets adds API time and cost without adding much agent value. Get this in writing — it is the decision people relitigate mid-cutover.

    A "move everything" default is what turns a two-week migration into a two-month one.

    COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off
  3. Confirm SolarWinds Service Desk can hold your support model

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Walk your current workflow through SolarWinds Service Desk: multi-brand, business hours, SLA targets, CSAT, side conversations, public vs internal notes, and any channel you depend on (voice, chat, WhatsApp, social). List anything with no native equivalent — those are project risks, not configuration details.

  4. Build the business case

    Project sponsor 1-2 days

    Model licence delta, migration effort, agent retraining, and the cost of staying put (Cost of Inaction). Executives approve a number, not a plan, and you will be asked for it again at the go/no-go.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk timeline
  5. Name owners and set the go/no-go date

    Project manager 1 day

    One named owner each for data, configuration, integrations, and agent enablement, plus a decision-maker who can call a rollback. Put the go/no-go meeting in calendars now, 48 hours before the freeze.

LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk specifics

ITIL alignment
Teams that started with LiveAgent for external support now need incident-problem-change workflows, CMDB, and asset management. SWSD provides the full ITIL lifecycle — incident → problem → change → release — with approval workflows and risk assessment.
Asset management and CMDB
LiveAgent has no asset tracking or CMDB. SWSD integrates asset discovery with service management, letting you link hardware and software to incidents.
Internal service catalogs
Moving from public-facing knowledge bases to structured internal employee service portals and formalized service request workflows.
Enterprise compliance
Organizations requiring formal change advisory boards, audit trails on configuration items, and SLA enforcement across multiple service providers often outgrow LiveAgent's scope.
Consolidation
Companies running LiveAgent alongside a separate ITSM tool consolidate into SWSD to reduce tool sprawl.

Don't move on until

  • Record counts confirmed for tickets, contacts, organisations and macros
  • Success criteria signed off by the support lead
  • Freeze window provisionally booked with the business
02 Data Audit Find out what is actually in the data before you try to move it. 0/6

Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.

  1. Take a full LiveAgent export and profile it

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Export to CSV or JSON and profile every file: row counts, null rates per column, distinct values, and type consistency. Compare row counts against the API totals from Discovery — a gap here means your export is silently truncated, usually by pagination.

    Data Profiler Profile the LiveAgent export for nulls, outliers and type drift
  2. Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform

    Data engineer 1 day

    Check delimiters, quoting, encoding (expect UTF-8, watch for BOMs and Latin-1), duplicate headers, and embedded newlines in ticket bodies. Ticket descriptions with raw newlines and commas break naive CSV parsers and silently shift columns.

    A single unescaped quote in one ticket body can shift every subsequent column without any error.

    CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export
  3. Inventory PII and set retention

    Compliance / DPO 2 days

    Scan for emails, phone numbers, payment card fragments, national IDs and anything else regulated in ticket bodies and custom fields — support tickets are where customers paste things they should not. Decide what gets migrated, masked, or dropped, and record the legal basis.

    Ticket bodies and attachments routinely contain card and ID data that never appears in a structured field.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system
  4. Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references

    Support ops 1-2 days

    Count duplicate contacts (same email, different casing), tickets whose requester no longer exists, organisations with no members, and attachments whose parent ticket is gone. Fix these in LiveAgent where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.

    Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns
  5. Clean and normalise the export

    Data engineer 2 days

    Trim whitespace, drop empty rows and columns, normalise casing on emails and tags, and standardise every timestamp to UTC ISO 8601. Timezone drift is invisible at load time and shows up weeks later as SLA reports nobody can reconcile.

  6. Produce a masked copy for sandbox work

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Generate a realistic but fake version of the export for testing and for any vendor who needs sample data. Loading real customer PII into a sandbox is a breach in most jurisdictions, and sandboxes are rarely covered by your DPA.

    PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing

Don't move on until

  • Export parses cleanly with no ragged rows or encoding errors
  • PII inventory complete and retention decisions recorded
  • Duplicate and orphan records quantified and triaged
03 Field Mapping Turn two schemas into one signed-off mapping spec. 0/9

Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.

  1. Generate the first-pass LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk field map

    Solution architect 2 days

    Start from an automated match on both schemas, then review every row by hand. Automated matching gets the obvious 70% right and is confidently wrong on the rest — especially anything named "type", "status" or "custom_field_1".

    Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk field pair
  2. Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names

    Support lead 1-2 days

    Enumerate every value in each picklist on both sides and map them explicitly. Value-level mismatches are the defect class that survives all the way to production because the field itself mapped fine — a ticket that should be "Pending" arriving as "Open" reopens SLA clocks.

    Statuses with no target equivalent (on-hold, pending-customer) need a policy decision, not a best guess.

  3. Decide how custom fields land

    Solution architect 2 days

    Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where SolarWinds Service Desk has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.

  4. Resolve identity and threading

    Data engineer 1 day

    Decide how source IDs are preserved — most platforms will not let you set the primary key, so keep the original ID in a custom field. Without it, reconciliation becomes fuzzy matching and every future support question about an old ticket is unanswerable.

    Losing the original ticket ID makes reconciliation and rollback effectively impossible.

  5. Plan attachments, inline images and threading order

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Confirm size limits, allowed MIME types, and whether inline images survive as attachments or need rehosting. Decide the comment ordering and author attribution rules: comments loaded out of order, or all attributed to the API user, destroy the conversation history agents rely on.

  6. Freeze and sign off the mapping spec

    Project manager 1 day

    Version the spec, walk the support lead through it row by row, and get explicit sign-off. Any change after this point goes through change control — mid-flight mapping edits are how partial loads happen.

  7. Use SWSD Departments

    if LiveAgent companies map to internal organizational units (e.g., "Engineering," "Marketing," "HR"). Departments in SWSD control assignment routing and reporting segmentation.

  8. Use SWSD Sites

    if LiveAgent companies map to physical locations (e.g., "New York Office," "London HQ"). Sites are available on Business and Professional plans.

  9. Use a custom field on the User record

    if LiveAgent companies represent external customers (e.g., "Acme Corp," "Widget Inc.") that do not correspond to any internal SWSD organizational structure. This is the most common scenario for teams migrating from customer-facing support.

LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk specifics

Unused custom fields
Audit field usage before recreating in SWSD.
Status mapping
LiveAgent New → SWSD New. LiveAgent Open → SWSD Assigned. LiveAgent Answered → SWSD Awaiting Input. LiveAgent Resolved → SWSD Resolved. LiveAgent Postponed → SWSD On Hold. Note: Awaiting Input and On Hold may be custom states in your SWSD instance — create them before migration and verify via GET /incidents/states.json.
Priority mapping
LiveAgent priorities (1–3 stars or custom) → SWSD priority levels (Low, Medium, High, Critical). Map 1-star → Low, 2-star → Medium, 3-star → High. If you use a Critical priority, assign it based on a tag or custom field rule.
Tag → Category
Flatten multi-tag tickets into a primary category. Store additional tags in a custom field.
Department → Group
Map LiveAgent department IDs to SWSD group IDs.

Don't move on until

  • Every source field is mapped, deliberately dropped, or parked in a custom field
  • Status, priority and channel value maps agreed with the support lead
  • Mapping spec version-controlled and signed off
04 Test Migration Prove the pipeline on a small, representative slice. 0/6

Objective A pilot load into a SolarWinds Service Desk sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.

  1. Stand up a SolarWinds Service Desk sandbox that matches production config

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Create the custom fields, groups, brands, business hours and SLA policies first. A pilot into a default sandbox tests nothing, because the failures you care about are all configuration mismatches.

  2. Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Take 500-1000 records chosen for difficulty, not convenience: the longest ticket threads, tickets with the most attachments, non-Latin character sets, merged and split tickets, deleted requesters, and every status value. A clean random sample proves only that easy records are easy.

  3. Run the load with masked data and instrument everything

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Log every API request and response with its source record ID. When 40 records fail out of 10,000 you need to know exactly which ones and why, without re-running the whole batch.

    PII Masker Never load real customer PII into a sandbox
  4. Measure real throughput against the rate limit

    Data engineer 1 day

    Record achieved records-per-hour under SolarWinds Service Desk's actual rate limits, including retries and backoff. Extrapolate to the full volume: if the maths says the full load exceeds your freeze window, you fix that now, not on cutover night.

    Published rate limits are ceilings, not throughput. Assume real-world rates are meaningfully lower once retries and backoff are counted.

  5. Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Diff source against target on record counts and field-level values. Every discrepancy gets a root cause and a fix — "probably fine" at pilot scale becomes thousands of broken records at full scale.

    Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up
  6. Put real agents in front of the pilot data

    Support lead 2 days

    Have two or three agents work sample tickets end to end in the sandbox. They find the things reconciliation cannot see: unreadable threading, missing context, macros that no longer make sense. Fix the mapping, then re-run.

Don't move on until

  • Pilot batch reconciles to 100% on record counts
  • Agents have reviewed sample tickets and confirmed they are workable
  • Measured throughput extrapolates to a viable full-load window
05 Cutover Execute the switch inside a controlled, reversible window. 0/7

Objective All in-scope data live in SolarWinds Service Desk, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.

  1. Pre-load history before the freeze

    Data engineer 3-10 days

    Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while LiveAgent stays live. Only open tickets and the final delta need to move inside the freeze — this is the single biggest lever on window length.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Size the freeze window from SolarWinds Service Desk's real API limits
  2. Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria

    Project manager 1 day

    A timed sequence: freeze start, final export, delta load, channel switch, smoke test, go/no-go, agent switch. Name who does each step and the explicit condition that triggers a rollback. Decide the abort criteria before the night, when nobody wants to be the one to call it.

  3. Freeze LiveAgent and take the final delta

    Support ops 2-4 hours

    Stop new ticket creation, let agents finish in-flight replies, then export everything changed since the pre-load. Announce the freeze to the whole business, not just support — someone always tries to raise a ticket during it.

    Tickets created during an unenforced freeze land in the old system and are the most common source of permanently lost data.

  4. Load the delta and open tickets

    Data engineer 2-6 hours

    Run the delta load, then reconcile counts before touching any channel. Do not repoint email until the delta has verified — an inbound ticket arriving mid-load is far harder to untangle than a few extra minutes of freeze.

    Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen
  5. Repoint channels and verify with live traffic

    IT / integrations 2-4 hours

    Switch email forwarding and MX or connector settings, update chat widgets and web forms, and re-authorise integrations. Then send real test tickets through every channel and confirm each lands, routes and triggers the right automation.

    Email forwarding changes can take up to a full DNS TTL to propagate — check the TTL days in advance and lower it if needed.

    Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze
  6. Run the go/no-go and switch the agents

    Project sponsor 1-2 hours

    Walk the exit criteria with the decision-maker, call it explicitly, then move agents over with a named person on hand for the first few hours. Keep LiveAgent read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.

  7. Keep LiveAgent active

    until migration is fully validated. Do not cut mail routing until delta counts are clean.

LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk specifics

Big bang
Migrate everything in a single cutover window. Works for small datasets (< 20K records). Requires a maintenance window.
Incremental (delta)
Migrate historical data first, then do a delta sync of records created/modified between the initial migration and cutover. Best for large datasets where downtime is unacceptable.
Tag all migrated records
in SWSD with a consistent marker (e.g., a migrated_from_liveagent tag or custom field) so you can identify and bulk-delete if needed.

Don't move on until

  • Full historical load complete and counts matched
  • Inbound channels repointed and verified with live test tickets
  • Rollback decision point passed explicitly, not by default
06 Validation Prove the migration is complete, then close it out. 0/6

Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.

  1. Run the full reconciliation

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Compare source and target on every object: total counts, counts by status, counts by group, attachment counts, and field-level spot checks on a random sample. Produce one report you can hand to an auditor.

    Migration Validation Tool Reconcile LiveAgent and SolarWinds Service Desk record-for-record
  2. Verify field completeness, not just record counts

    Data engineer 1 day

    Re-profile the loaded data and compare null rates per field against the source profile. Matching record counts with a field that silently arrived empty is the failure mode counts alone will never catch.

    Data Profiler Prove field completeness held up through the load
  3. Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines

    Support ops 2-3 days

    Recreate your core dashboards — volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT — and compare to pre-migration figures for the same period. Explain every variance; a changed SLA calculation is a real finding, not a rounding error.

    SLA and first-response metrics are usually recalculated from the loaded timestamps, so they will differ if any timestamp mapping was approximate.

  4. Test the workflow layer end to end

    Support ops 2 days

    Fire every trigger, automation, SLA escalation, macro and notification with a live ticket. Workflow does not migrate — it gets rebuilt — so it is untested until someone has actually watched it run.

  5. Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail

    Compliance / DPO 1 day

    Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in SolarWinds Service Desk, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for
  6. Sign off, then decommission on a schedule

    Project sponsor 1 day

    Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep LiveAgent read-only for an agreed period (30-90 days is typical), take a final archive export, and only then cancel. Diarise the decommission date so it does not quietly renew.

Don't move on until

  • Full reconciliation report attached to the project record
  • Reporting baselines match pre-migration figures within agreed tolerance
  • Formal acceptance signed and archive retention scheduled

Field mapping reference

The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.

Object Equivalent 13 fields
LiveAgent fieldSolarWinds Service Desk fieldNotes
Tickets Incidents / Service Requests Tickets map to incidents or service requests depending on type
Contacts Users (Requesters) SWSD users serve as both agents and requesters
Companies Departments, Sites, or custom field No direct "Company" object — see decision tree below
Agents Users (Agent/Admin roles) Role-based, not a separate object
Departments Groups LiveAgent departments map to SWSD groups for routing
Tags Categories (partial) Tags are free-form; SWSD categories are hierarchical
Knowledge Base Articles Solutions Different structure — Solutions use categories, not portals
Chat Transcripts Incident Comments Flattened into comment threads, losing real-time metadata
Custom Contact Fields Custom User Fields Must be manually created in SWSD first
Custom Ticket Fields Custom Incident Fields Type compatibility must be verified
Call Recordings Attachments on Incidents Audio files migrate as attachments, losing call metadata
Internal Notes Private Comments Preserved as private (agent-only) comments
Forums / Feedback No equivalent SWSD has no community forum feature
LiveAgent SWSD 21 fields
LiveAgent fieldSolarWinds Service Desk fieldNotes
ticket.id custom field source_liveagent_id Store for idempotent re-runs
ticket.code custom field source_ticket_code Preserve user-facing reference
ticket.subject incident.name Direct copy; normalize empty subjects to "No Subject"
ticket.status incident.state Map: New→New, Open→Assigned, Answered→Awaiting Input, Resolved→Resolved, Postponed→On Hold (custom)
ticket.priority incident.priority Map: 1-star→Low, 2-star→Medium, 3-star→High
ticket.date_created incident.created_at ISO 8601 format; test backdating in sandbox first
ticket.department_id incident.assignee.group Map via group lookup table
ticket.tags [] incident.category.name Primary tag → category; overflow → custom field
ticket.channel custom field source_channel Preserve original channel (email, chat, phone, social)
contact.email user.email Lowercase, trim, deduplicate
contact.firstname + lastname user.name Concatenate with space
contact.phone user.phone Direct copy
contact.company_id user.department or custom field Map per company→dept/site/custom decision tree
contact.custom_fields user.custom_fields Create field definitions in SWSD admin panel first
message.body comment.body Sanitize HTML, preserve formatting, rewrite image links
message.type (internal) comment.is_private Internal notes → private comments
message.channel Comment body prefix Prepend [CHAT], [EMAIL], [CALL] if channel attribution needed
message.attachments [] incident.attachments [] Download from LA, upload to SWSD if ≤ 25 MB; externalize otherwise
kb_article.title solution.name Direct copy
kb_article.body solution.content Rewrite internal links pointing to LiveAgent URLs
kb_article.visibility solution.visibility Map: public→public, internal→internal

Risk matrix

Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.

ObjectRiskNotes
Tickets / Incidents medium Tickets map to SWSD incidents but require status normalization, type classification (incident vs. service request), and pre-creation of all referenced users and departments before loading.
Contacts / Users medium LiveAgent contacts must be transformed into SWSD users with correct role assignments, and duplicate contact records must be resolved before load to avoid orphaned incidents.
Companies / Departments high There is no direct Company equivalent in SWSD, requiring a custom mapping strategy to departments, sites, or custom fields that must be decided and configured before any other data is loaded.
Ticket Messages / Comments medium Individual ticket messages must be extracted per-ticket via a separate API endpoint and re-associated as incident comments, with internal notes requiring explicit private flag mapping.
Attachments high Attachments cannot be imported via CSV and must be transferred programmatically via the API, with call recording attachments losing all associated metadata during the process.
Knowledge Base Articles / Solutions medium LiveAgent knowledge base articles migrate to SWSD Solutions but require category hierarchy to be rebuilt in SWSD first, as the portal-based structure of LiveAgent does not map directly to SWSD's solution categories.
Tags / Categories high LiveAgent's free-form tags must be converted to SWSD's predefined hierarchical category structure, requiring a full taxonomy mapping exercise with no automated path for translation.
Custom Fields high Custom ticket and contact fields must be manually recreated in SWSD with verified type compatibility before migration, as CSV import does not support custom field updates and mismatched types will cause load failures.
Chat Transcripts high Chat transcripts lose their real-time channel metadata when flattened into incident comment threads, and there is no structured way to preserve chat-specific attributes such as response times or agent ratings.
Forums and Community Feedback high LiveAgent forum and feedback data has no equivalent object in SWSD and cannot be migrated, representing a permanent data loss category that must be archived externally before decommissioning LiveAgent.

The hard parts

What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.

Customer vs. ITSM Schema Gap

LiveAgent's flat ticket-and-contact model must be manually mapped to SWSD's relational ITSM schema of incidents, users, departments, and configuration items, requiring deliberate transformation decisions for every object type.

Company-to-Department Object Mismatch

LiveAgent's Company object has no direct equivalent in SWSD, forcing teams to choose between mapping companies to departments, sites, or custom fields — a decision with downstream impact on routing, reporting, and user association.

Tag-to-Category Structural Incompatibility

LiveAgent tags are free-form flat labels, while SWSD categories are hierarchical and predefined, requiring a full taxonomy redesign before incident data can be loaded correctly.

Strict Relational Load Order

SWSD enforces referential integrity, requiring data to be loaded in a strict hierarchy — Users → Departments → Incidents → Comments → Attachments — so any out-of-order load will produce foreign key violations and failed records.

Chat and Call Metadata Loss

LiveAgent chat transcripts and call recordings cannot be migrated with their real-time metadata intact; chat threads are flattened into incident comments and call recordings migrate only as audio file attachments, losing all associated call metadata.

Automations and SLAs Must Be Rebuilt

LiveAgent automations, SLA rules, chat widgets, and IVR configurations have no programmatic migration path into SWSD and must be manually recreated in the target environment before go-live.

Tools used in this playbook

All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Helpdesk Evaluator Sanity-check that SolarWinds Service Desk is the right target before you commit COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk timeline Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing Regex Tester with Migration Patterns Prototype the extraction patterns before scripting them Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the LiveAgent → SolarWinds Service Desk field pair Data Format Converter Reshape the export into the format SolarWinds Service Desk's importer expects CSV to JSON Converter Turn flat exports into the JSON the API expects JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet XML to JSON Converter Convert legacy XML payloads for a JSON-first importer CSV to SQL Converter Load the export into a staging table you can query Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up JWT Decoder Inspect the token when the API rejects your calls Base64 Decoder Decode attachment payloads to confirm they survived transit Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze

FAQ

Can I migrate LiveAgent tickets to SolarWinds Service Desk using CSV only?

Partially. LiveAgent supports CSV export for ticket metadata, and SWSD supports CSV import for incidents — but CSV only brings in text, not attachments, screenshots, or individual message threads. LiveAgent CSV export captures metadata but not message bodies. For full data fidelity, use the LiveAgent API v3 for extraction and the SWSD REST API for loading.

What are the API rate limits for this migration?

LiveAgent's API rate limit is 180 requests per minute per API key for cloud-hosted accounts. The GET tickets endpoint returns a maximum of 1,000 rows per call and caps at 10,000 records per filter — use date-range windowing for large exports. SWSD rate limits vary by plan tier; monitor the response headers and implement exponential backoff on 429 responses. Self-hosted LiveAgent instances can override rate limits via the qu_g_settings database table.

How do LiveAgent objects map to SolarWinds Service Desk?

Tickets map to Incidents or Service Requests. Contacts become Users with the Requester role. Companies map to Departments, Sites, or custom fields (SWSD has no Company object). Tags map to hierarchical Categories (not 1:1 — requires planning). Knowledge Base articles become Solutions. Chat transcripts are flattened into incident comments, losing real-time metadata.

How long does a LiveAgent to SolarWinds Service Desk migration take?

For environments under 50,000 records with a dedicated engineer, expect 2–3 weeks including extraction, transformation, loading, and validation. Larger datasets (100K+ records) with complex custom fields and multi-channel histories typically take 4–8 weeks. A managed migration service can compress this timeline.

What data is lost when migrating from LiveAgent to SolarWinds Service Desk?

Chat visitor metadata (pages viewed, browser info), SLA timing data, ticket merge history, forum/feedback board content, chat widget configurations, and automation rules cannot be migrated. Call recordings transfer as file attachments but lose call-specific metadata. Channel indicators (WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.) are lost unless stored in a custom field. All automations must be rebuilt manually in SWSD.

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