Only SWSD knowledge articles, users, and select incidents have an Ada equivalent. Prioritize knowledge transfer — it directly powers Ada's AI agent. Archive everything else.
Migrating from SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) to Ada is a structural transformation, not a like-for-like platform swap. SWSD is an ITIL-centric service management platform built around incidents, problems, changes, assets, and CMDB records, while Ada is an agentic customer experience (ACX) platform whose core object is the AI-driven Conversation — making the two systems architecturally incompatible. No native migration path exists between the platforms; only a subset of SWSD data (primarily knowledge articles and end-user records) has a meaningful destination in Ada, while ITIL objects such as problems, changes, releases, and assets have no Ada equivalent and must be archived externally. The migration requires a custom extraction pipeline against SWSD's REST API, an HTML-to-markdown transformation layer for knowledge content, selective curation of incident data into Ada knowledge articles, and manual rebuilding of SLA policies, automations, and workflows as Ada Coaching rules, Actions, and Processes.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Quick Answer
This migration is a structural transformation, not a like-for-like swap. SWSD incidents (with comments) can be archived, curated into knowledge, or partially replayed as Ada conversations. Problems, changes, releases, assets, and CMDB records have no Ada equivalent and must be archived separately. SWSD's REST API (api.samanage.com) uses offset pagination. Ada's Platform API defaults to 10,000 requests/day, 100/minute, and 10/second, with the End Users and Conversations APIs allowing up to 60,000 requests/day (300/minute, 30/second). Ada's Knowledge API supports up to 50,000 articles per AI Agent with a 100KB max per article and a 10MB max request payload. A typical migration for 30,000–100,000 incidents takes 3–5 weeks including mapping, test runs, knowledge import, and cutover.
Data you will lose
Problems, changes, releases, assets, CMDB relationships, approval workflows, SLA configurations, and automation rules have no target in Ada. Export these to CSV/JSON and archive them in a data warehouse before decommissioning SWSD. This is not optional — it is a compliance and audit requirement for most organizations. If legal, compliance, or audit teams need exact ticket chronology, original timestamps, or full attachment fidelity, keep SWSD data in a warehouse or read-only archive and expose it separately.
Rate limits vary by plan tier
SolarWinds' April 2024 release notes state the Essentials plan allows 100 API calls per minute (except user provisioning actions at 1,500/minute). Advanced allows up to 1,000 calls/minute; Premier up to 1,500/minute per the April 2023 enforcement announcement. There are no rate-limit response headers in SWSD — the API does not return X-RateLimit-* headers. Build conservative backoff logic (start at 60–80 requests/minute) and confirm the live limit in your tenant before a bulk export.
Internal vs. external knowledge
SWSD Solutions have a state field (Draft, Published, Internal). SWSD comments can be public or private, and the platform allows converting private to public but not the reverse. You must filter out internal articles and private notes before pushing data to Ada, or explicitly tag them if using Ada for internal employee support. Feeding internal credentials or private IT procedures to a public-facing Ada bot is a severe security risk.
24-hour auto-deletion rule
End users created via POST /v2/end-users/ that are not associated with a conversation within 24 hours are automatically deleted. You must create the end user and start a conversation for them within that window. Batch your user creation and conversation creation together — do not create all users first and then circle back to create conversations days later. With 60,000 requests/day and 300/minute limits on this API, you can process roughly 20,000 user+conversation pairs per day (each pair requires at minimum 3 API calls: create user, create conversation, add first message).
Delta sync tip
Run a final extraction filtering for updated_at > [initial_extraction_timestamp] just before cutover. Transform the delta payload and load it into Ada. This keeps your cutover window tight and prevents data loss from records modified during the migration.
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.
Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.
Keep these open
-
Pull the real numbers out of SolarWinds Service Desk
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 -
Decide what history actually moves
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 -
Confirm Ada can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Ada: 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.
-
Build the business case
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 SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada timeline -
Name owners and set the go/no-go date
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.
SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada specifics
- Coaching
- Ada's instruction layer that shapes how the AI agent responds, enforces policies, and avoids certain topics. SLA escalation logic is often rebuilt here.
- Knowledge Source
- A logical container grouping Ada knowledge articles; the top-level object before articles can be created.
- AI-first customer support
- Teams replacing a traditional ITSM ticketing workflow with Ada's AI agents that can autonomously resolve inquiries without human intervention.
- Knowledge base transfer
- SWSD's solutions (knowledge articles) need to feed Ada's AI agent so it can generate accurate, context-aware responses from day one.
- Conversation history preservation
- Teams want historical incident data available in Ada so human agents have context on prior interactions during handoffs.
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.
Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.
Keep these open
-
Take a full SolarWinds Service Desk export and profile it
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 SolarWinds Service Desk export for nulls, outliers and type drift -
Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform
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 -
Inventory PII and set retention
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 -
Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references
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 SolarWinds Service Desk where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.
Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns -
Clean and normalise the export
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.
-
Produce a masked copy for sandbox work
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
SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada specifics
- Attachment download gaps
- SWSD's API lets you attach files to incidents but does not provide a consistent programmatic download endpoint across all plan tiers. Verify your plan's API surface and test attachment retrieval before committing to a timeline.
- CSV export cell limits
- If you use CSV as a fallback extraction method, any cell containing over 32,767 characters causes misaligned rows when opened in Excel. Preprocess long-text fields.
- Source platform drift
- In SolarWinds' June 2026 release notes, Task Management v2 requires migration of existing tasks and explicitly states that Task Management v2 has no API support. If your source tenant is moving to Task Management v2 during the migration, freeze task scope early.
- Scheduled backups
- Customers can request a weekly scheduled backup in CSV format, and manual CSV exports are available at any time. Use this as a safety net alongside API extraction.
- description_no_html shortcut
- SWSD exposes a description_no_html field on incidents that strips tags but discards formatting. Useful for quick extraction of incident descriptions, but insufficient for solution articles where heading structure carries semantic meaning.
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.
Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.
Keep these open
-
Generate the first-pass SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada field map
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 SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada field pair -
Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names
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.
-
Decide how custom fields land
Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Ada has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.
-
Resolve identity and threading
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.
-
Plan attachments, inline images and threading order
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.
-
Freeze and sign off the mapping spec
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.
-
Map categories to tags
SWSD solution categories become Ada tags. SWSD sub-categories become compound tags (e.g., network-vpn). Create tags first via the Knowledge API, then reference them when creating articles.
-
Check character limits
Validate against Ada's 100KB article limit. Split oversized articles at logical section boundaries — do not truncate mid-sentence.
-
Handle multilingual articles
Store each language version as a separate article; tag with lang-{code}.
SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada specifics
- Filter by state
- Only pull Published articles for public-facing bots. For internal employee support bots, Internal articles may be included — tag them explicitly and verify Ada access controls are in place.
- Strip HTML
- Convert description to clean Markdown (see transformation section above).
- Re-host embedded images
- Download from SWSD's authenticated S3 URLs, upload to your CDN, and update links.
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.
Objective A pilot load into a Ada sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
-
Stand up a Ada sandbox that matches production config
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.
-
Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample
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.
-
Run the load with masked data and instrument everything
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 -
Measure real throughput against the rate limit
Record achieved records-per-hour under Ada'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.
-
Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure
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 -
Put real agents in front of the pilot data
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.
Objective All in-scope data live in Ada, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.
Keep these open
-
Pre-load history before the freeze
Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while SolarWinds Service Desk 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 Ada's real API limits -
Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria
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.
-
Freeze SolarWinds Service Desk and take the final delta
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.
-
Load the delta and open tickets
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 -
Repoint channels and verify with live traffic
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 -
Run the go/no-go and switch the agents
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 SolarWinds Service Desk read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
SolarWinds Service Desk → Ada specifics
- Hard cutover with SWSD freeze
- Set a cutover date, stop accepting new SWSD tickets 24–48 hours before, work down the open queue, then switch. This minimizes data split but requires a service pause.
- Parallel operation
- Run SWSD for in-flight incidents and Ada for new inquiries simultaneously. Maintain SWSD in read-only mode for historical reference. Disadvantage: agents work two systems during the overlap period.
- Incident-by-incident migration
- As each open SWSD incident is resolved, archive it and create the corresponding Ada record. This is operationally clean but extends the migration window.
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.
Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.
Keep these open
-
Run the full reconciliation
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 SolarWinds Service Desk and Ada record-for-record -
Verify field completeness, not just record counts
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 -
Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines
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.
-
Test the workflow layer end to end
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.
-
Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail
Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Ada, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.
PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for -
Sign off, then decommission on a schedule
Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep SolarWinds Service Desk 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.
What Data Can You Migrate from SWSD Ada
| SolarWinds Service Desk field | Ada field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Solutions (KB articles) | Knowledge Articles | Highest-ROI path. Via Knowledge API — Sources, Articles, Tags. |
| Incidents | Conversations or Knowledge | Archive, curate into knowledge, or replay as historical conversations |
| Incident comments | Messages | Text-only; attachments require separate handling. Private notes need redaction. |
| Users (requesters) | End Users | Map email, name, metadata |
| Users (agents/technicians) | N/A | Ada uses AI agents, not human agent roster records |
| Problems | N/A | No Ada equivalent; archive to cold storage |
| Changes | N/A | No Ada equivalent |
| Releases | N/A | No Ada equivalent |
| Assets / CMDB | N/A | No Ada equivalent |
| Service Catalog items | N/A | No Ada equivalent |
| SLA policies | N/A | Must be rebuilt as Ada Coaching rules |
| Automations / Workflows | N/A | Must be rebuilt as Ada Actions and Processes |
| Custom fields | End User metadata | String/integer/boolean only in profile.metadata |
| Attachments | Limited | Ada attachment upload is limited to handoff state; returns presigned URLs valid up to 7 days. Not a permanent repository. |
SWSD Incidents Ada Conversations
Resolved incidents require editorial curation into knowledge articles rather than raw transfer, open incidents must remain in SWSD until resolved, and neither path preserves original timestamps or full attachment fidelity — making this the highest-risk data entity in the migration.
| SolarWinds Service Desk field | Ada field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| requester.email | End User profile.email | Direct map |
| requester.name | End User profile.name | Direct map |
| name (incident title) | First message text or metadata | No direct "subject" field in Ada |
| description | First conversation message body | Strip HTML |
| state | profile.metadata.swsd_state | Store as metadata; no Ada state equivalent |
| priority | profile.metadata.swsd_priority | Store as metadata |
| category | Tag or metadata | No native category in Ada conversations |
| comments [] | Conversation messages | Map each comment as a message; preserve chronological order |
| created_at | profile.metadata.swsd_created_at | Ada generates its own timestamps; store original for reference |
| custom_fields | profile.metadata.* | String/integer/boolean only |
| assignee | N/A | Ada uses AI agents, not assignee routing |
| due_date / sla | N/A | No SLA concept in Ada |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Articles (Solutions) | medium | Solutions are the highest-ROI migration path and map directly to Ada Knowledge Articles, but each article must be individually transformed from HTML to clean markdown and reviewed editorially to stay within Ada's 100KB-per-article and 50,000-articles-per-agent limits. |
| Incidents | high | Resolved incidents require editorial curation into knowledge articles rather than raw transfer, open incidents must remain in SWSD until resolved, and neither path preserves original timestamps or full attachment fidelity — making this the highest-risk data entity in the migration. |
| Incident Comments | medium | Comments can be partially replayed as Ada conversation messages via the Messages API, but the process is text-only, strips original timestamps, discards images, and requires redaction of any private or internal notes before import. |
| End Users (Requesters) | medium | Requester records map to Ada End Users by email address, but SAML/SSO tenants may have null email fields requiring identity remediation, and Ada automatically deletes end user records after 24 hours if no conversation is linked. |
| Agent and Technician Accounts | low | Human agent and technician roster records have no Ada equivalent and are intentionally not migrated, so the risk is limited to ensuring these records are archived before SWSD decommission. |
| Custom Fields | medium | SWSD custom fields can be partially migrated into Ada's end user profile.metadata object, but Ada accepts only string, integer, and boolean types, meaning complex or multi-select custom field structures must be flattened or transformed before import. |
| Problems, Changes, and Releases | high | These core ITIL objects have no Ada equivalent whatsoever and must be exported to cold storage before SWSD decommission; failure to archive them before cutover results in permanent, unrecoverable data loss. |
| Assets and CMDB Records | high | SWSD's asset inventory and CMDB relationship graph have no target in Ada and require a dedicated warehouse export, with the additional risk that CMDB relational context cannot be reconstructed from flat CSV exports alone. |
| Attachments | high | Ada is not a permanent attachment store — attachment upload is limited to handoff state and presigned URLs are valid for up to 7 days only — so all SWSD attachments must be re-hosted to an external CDN and linked from knowledge articles before SWSD is decommissioned. |
| SLA Policies and Automations | high | SLA configurations, automation rules, and approval workflows have no migration path and must be manually redesigned and rebuilt as Ada Coaching rules, Actions, and Processes, with no automated translation tooling available and high risk of behavioral gaps if rebuild scope is underestimated. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Architectural Incompatibility Between Platforms
SWSD's relational ITIL data model centered on incidents, problems, changes, and CMDB records has no structural equivalent in Ada's conversation-and-knowledge-centric architecture, requiring full data model redesign rather than field-level mapping.
Knowledge Content Transformation Pipeline
SWSD solution articles are stored as raw HTML with nested tables and inline formatting that must be cleaned, restructured, and converted to Ada-compatible markdown before ingestion, as Ada's LLM reasoning engine requires semantically clean content within a 100KB-per-article hard limit.
Offset Pagination and Rate Limit Management
SWSD's REST API uses offset-only pagination with no cursor support and no rate-limit response headers, requiring conservative backoff logic tuned to plan tier limits (100–1,500 requests/minute) to safely extract large incident and user datasets without mid-export token invalidation.
ITIL Object Archival Before Decommission
Problems, changes, releases, assets, CMDB relationships, SLA configurations, and approval workflows have no Ada target and must be exported to CSV/JSON and warehoused prior to SWSD decommission to satisfy compliance and audit requirements.
SLA and Automation Logic Reconstruction
SWSD SLA policies and automation workflows cannot be migrated directly and must be manually rebuilt from scratch in Ada as Coaching rules, Actions, and Processes — a design-intensive effort with no automated translation path.
End User Deduplication and SSO Identity Gaps
SWSD tenants using SAML-based SSO may have user records with null or placeholder email values rather than valid addresses, which breaks Ada's End Users API deduplication logic and requires a pre-migration audit and identity remediation pass before user import begins.
What breaks
Known failure modes. Have a recovery plan for each before you cut over.
Attachment download gaps
SWSD's API lets you attach files to incidents but does not provide a consistent programmatic download endpoint across all plan tiers. Verify your plan's API surface and test attachment retrieval before committing to a timeline.
CSV export cell limits
If you use CSV as a fallback extraction method, any cell containing over 32,767 characters causes misaligned rows when opened in Excel. Preprocess long-text fields.
Source platform drift
In SolarWinds' June 2026 release notes, Task Management v2 requires migration of existing tasks and explicitly states that Task Management v2 has no API support. If your source tenant is moving to Task Management v2 during the migration, freeze task scope early.
Scheduled backups
Customers can request a weekly scheduled backup in CSV format, and manual CSV exports are available at any time. Use this as a safety net alongside API extraction.
description_no_html shortcut
SWSD exposes a description_no_html field on incidents that strips tags but discards formatting. Useful for quick extraction of incident descriptions, but insufficient for solution articles where heading structure carries semantic meaning.
SAML/SSO user records
If your SWSD tenant uses SAML-based SSO, user records in SWSD may not carry email addresses in the standard email field — identity is often asserted by the IdP at login. Audit your user export for null or placeholder email values before mapping to Ada's End Users API, which requires a valid email for deduplication.
Sub-category hierarchy
SWSD supports nested categories and sub-categories. Ada's Knowledge API uses a flat tag model — there is no parent-child tag relationship. Map SWSD category + sub-category combinations to compound tags (e.g., network-vpn, hardware-laptop) rather than trying to preserve hierarchy. Document the flattening rules before transformation begins.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I migrate SolarWinds Service Desk tickets directly into Ada?
Not as a 1:1 historical import. Ada's Conversations API supports text-only messages with Ada-generated timestamps, so you lose chronological fidelity and attachment support. Most teams archive incidents and promote only curated resolutions into Ada as knowledge articles.
What SolarWinds Service Desk data is lost when migrating to Ada?
Problems, changes, releases, assets, CMDB relationships, SLA metrics, approval workflows, agent assignment history, and automation rules have no Ada equivalent. Incident attachments, rich-text formatting, and original timestamps are also lost or degraded. Export and archive this data before decommissioning SWSD.
How long does a SolarWinds Service Desk to Ada migration take?
A typical migration for 30,000–100,000 incidents takes 3–5 weeks including data mapping, knowledge import, test runs, and cutover. Smaller environments under 20,000 incidents can be completed in 2–3 weeks by a dedicated engineer.
What are the API rate limits that affect this migration?
SWSD Essentials allows 100 API calls/minute. Ada's Platform API defaults to 10,000 requests/day (100/minute, 10/second). The End Users and Conversations APIs allow up to 60,000 requests/day (300/minute, 30/second). Ada Knowledge supports up to 50,000 articles per AI Agent, 100KB per article, and 10MB per request.
Should I migrate SWSD knowledge articles or incidents first?
Knowledge articles first. They directly power Ada's AI agent and deliver immediate value. Import them via the Knowledge API at least 24 hours before go-live to allow indexing. Historical conversations provide context for human agents but do not influence AI agent behavior.