SWSD incidents map to Dixa conversations via API, but ITSM objects like CMDB, problems, and changes have no Dixa equivalent. Plan 2–5 weeks for 50K+ incidents.
Migrating from SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) to Dixa is a structural transformation rather than a like-for-like platform swap — there is no native migration path between the two systems. SWSD is built on an ITIL-centric relational data model anchored by Incidents, Problems, Changes, CMDB assets, and approval workflows, while Dixa is a conversation-first omnichannel routing engine whose core object is the Conversation. Only SWSD Incidents and their associated comments have a meaningful mapping target in Dixa; Problems, Changes, Releases, Assets, and Service Catalog items have no Dixa equivalent and must be archived externally. Custom ETL scripting is required to extract data via the SWSD REST API, transform the relational incident schema into Dixa's linear conversation format, pre-provision users and agents in Dixa, and handle attachment re-hosting before submission to Dixa's import endpoint.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
TL;DR — SolarWinds Service Desk to Dixa Migration
Migrating from SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) to Dixa is a structural transformation: you're flattening an ITIL-centric service management platform into a conversation-first omnichannel routing system. Only SWSD incidents (and their comments) map to Dixa conversations. Problems, changes, releases, assets, CMDB records, and service catalog items have no Dixa equivalent and must be archived or left behind. The SWSD REST API (api.samanage.com) uses offset pagination with a max page size of 200 and does not publicly document rate-limit thresholds. Dixa's import endpoint supports only email and genericapimessaging channel types, enforces 10 requests/second per token, and has no idempotency — duplicate submissions create duplicate conversations. Dixa API access requires the Ultimate or Prime plan. A typical migration for 50,000–150,000 incidents takes 3–5 weeks including mapping, test runs, and cutover. Written 2025. Targets SWSD API v2.1 and Dixa API v1.
What you lose permanently
SWSD's problem-incident linking, change approval workflows, release tracking, CMDB dependencies, and asset lifecycle management have zero representation in Dixa. If your team relies on these, Dixa is not the right target platform. If you need to move ITSM data to another ITSM platform, see How to Migrate from SolarWinds Service Desk to ServiceNow.
Alternative extraction
SWSD supports CSV export from index pages (Analytics → Data Export) for incidents, users, and assets. This is useful for row count validation and cross-referencing, but it does not include comments, internal notes, or attachments. Use the API for the full dataset.
Private comment leak risk
If you include SWSD private comments as regular messages in your import payload rather than using the separate notes endpoint post-import, those comments will be visible to end users in Dixa. Always handle private comments in a separate post-import pass.
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
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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 Dixa can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Dixa: 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.
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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 → Dixa 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.
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
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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.
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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 → Dixa specifics
- Placeholder emails
- SWSD requesters with addresses like user@local.domain or noreply@company.internal will fail Dixa's email validation. Normalize or replace these before import.
- Duplicate emails
- SWSD allows multiple users with the same email in some configurations. Dixa deduplicates end users by email — two SWSD users sharing an email collapse to a single Dixa end user. Audit for this before import and decide which user record is canonical.
- Deleted users
- SWSD incidents may reference deactivated or deleted users whose email addresses no longer exist. Create a fallback profile (e.g., deleted-user@migration.internal) and assign orphaned incidents to it. Log all affected incident IDs for post-migration review.
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
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Generate the first-pass SolarWinds Service Desk → Dixa 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 → Dixa 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.
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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 Dixa has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 Dixa sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Dixa 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.
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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.
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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 Dixa'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.
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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 Dixa, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.
Keep these open
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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 Dixa'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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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 Dixa 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.
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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.
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Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail
Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Dixa, 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.
SolarWinds Service Desk → Dixa specifics
- Count match
- Total SWSD incidents exported vs. Dixa conversations created (check your migration_log table)
- Message count
- Verify comment counts per incident match message counts per conversation (spot-check 50+ records)
- User mapping
- Confirm requester emails in SWSD match end user emails in Dixa for a random sample of 100 conversations
- Attachment integrity
- Open 50–100 conversations in Dixa and confirm all attachments load successfully
- Custom attributes
- Verify values migrated correctly for each custom field type (dropdown, multi-select, date, text)
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
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Incidents | medium | Incidents are the only SWSD object with a direct Dixa equivalent, but transformation complexity is significant due to status mapping, custom field flattening, and the requirement to sequence users and agents before import. |
| Comments / Messages | medium | Public comments map to inbound/outbound messages and private comments to internal notes, but inline base64 images and HTML formatting require additional parse-and-rehost processing before submission. |
| Attachments | high | Pre-signed S3 URLs expire within ~60 minutes of extraction, making attachments the most operationally fragile entity and requiring a same-pass download-and-rehost strategy to avoid mass HTTP 403 failures. |
| Users / End Users | low | Users map cleanly to Dixa end users via the POST /v1/endusers endpoint, though deduplication logic is required to prevent creating multiple Dixa end user records for the same email address. |
| Agents / Technicians | medium | Agents must be provisioned in Dixa manually or via SCIM before migration begins and cannot be bulk-imported through the conversation import API, creating a blocking dependency for large agent rosters. |
| Custom Fields | medium | SWSD supports multi-level dropdown custom fields that must be flattened into Dixa's single-level custom attributes, requiring schema redesign and potential data loss for hierarchical field values. |
| Categories | medium | SWSD's hierarchical category tree has no structural equivalent in Dixa and must be denormalized and flattened into free-form tags, which may lose parent-child classification context. |
| Problems | high | Problems have no Dixa equivalent and cannot be imported; all problem records including linked incident associations must be archived to an external system before cutover or the data is permanently inaccessible in the new platform. |
| Changes / CMDB / Assets | high | Changes, Releases, CMDB records, and Asset lifecycle data are entirely out of scope for Dixa import and represent a hard capability gap requiring external archival or a parallel ITSM system if this data must remain accessible. |
| SLA Policies and Automations | high | SWSD SLA policies and automation rules have no import path into Dixa and must be fully rebuilt manually as Dixa SLAs and Flows respectively, with no tooling support to accelerate the rebuild. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
ITIL-to-Conversation Model Flattening
SWSD's relational incident structure — including problem-incident links, change associations, and multi-stage approval states — must be collapsed into Dixa's linear, chronological conversation thread with no support for relational object references.
Irrecoverable ITSM Object Loss
Problems, Changes, Releases, CMDB records, and Service Catalog items have zero equivalents in Dixa and cannot be imported, requiring external archival before cutover to prevent permanent data loss.
Expiring Attachment Pre-Signed URLs
SWSD serves attachments via AWS S3 pre-signed URLs that expire within approximately 60 minutes of generation, requiring attachments to be downloaded and re-hosted to persistent storage during the same extraction pass as incident data.
No Dixa Import Idempotency
Dixa's import endpoint has no idempotency mechanism, meaning any duplicate submission — caused by script retries or failed partial runs — will create duplicate conversations that must be identified and deleted manually.
Strict Agent and User Pre-Provisioning Dependency
All Dixa end users and agents must be created via API or SCIM before conversation import begins, because Dixa's import payload requires valid Dixa-side user IDs that cannot be resolved at import time against SWSD identifiers.
Base64 Inline Image Reprocessing
SWSD incident descriptions and comments may contain inline images as base64-encoded data URIs, which Dixa does not decode in message bodies and which must be individually extracted, uploaded to persistent storage, and replaced with public URLs before import.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can you migrate SolarWinds Service Desk data to Dixa?
Yes, but only incidents and their comments map to Dixa conversations. SWSD problems, changes, releases, assets, and CMDB records have no Dixa equivalent and must be archived separately. The migration uses the SWSD REST API for extraction and Dixa's POST /v1/conversations/import endpoint for loading.
What Dixa plan do I need for API-based migration?
Dixa API access is only available on the Ultimate ($169/user/month) or Prime plans. The Growth plan does not include API access. Confirm your contract includes it before building any migration scripts.
How do I preserve original ticket creation dates in Dixa?
Pass the original SWSD created_at timestamps into the Dixa import payload. Test on a small batch first — if timestamps aren't preserved, all imported conversations will show the import date instead of the original date, destroying historical reporting.
How long does a SolarWinds Service Desk to Dixa migration take?
A typical migration takes 2–5 weeks for 50,000–150,000 incidents, including data mapping, test migrations, and cutover. Smaller datasets under 10,000 incidents can be completed in 1–2 weeks. The largest time sinks are rebuilding automations as Dixa Flows and archiving ITSM objects.
What SolarWinds Service Desk objects cannot be migrated to Dixa?
Problems, changes, releases, assets, CMDB records, service catalog items, approval workflows, and knowledge base articles cannot be migrated. SLA policies and automations must be rebuilt manually. Only incidents with their comments and attachments map to Dixa conversations.