SWSD-to-Enchant migration maps incidents to tickets via REST APIs. Enchant's 100 credits/min rate limit and lack of custom fields are the two biggest constraints to plan around.
There is no native migration path from SolarWinds Service Desk to Enchant. SWSD is an ITIL-centric service management platform with incidents, problems, changes, assets, and a full CMDB, while Enchant is a conversation-first shared inbox with a single ticket type, no custom fields on tickets, and no asset or workflow equivalents. Migrating requires flattening SWSD's relational ITSM data model into Enchant's simplified schema via custom API-based extraction, transformation, and loading — with most ITSM-specific objects (problems, changes, assets, CMDB) either archived or abandoned entirely.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Created timestamps
Enchant's API does not expose created_at as a writable field on ticket creation. Migrated tickets will show the migration date as the creation date, not the original SWSD date. Work around this by including the original creation date in a metadata note or the ticket subject line (e.g., [2023-03-15] Original Subject). (dev.enchant.com)
Ticket type constraint
Enchant's API only allows creating tickets of type email. If SWSD contains phone, chat, or social media tickets, they will all become email type tickets in Enchant. Preserve the original channel as a label (e.g., channel:phone, channel:chat).
Attachment size limit
SolarWinds allows 25 MB per attached file in comments. (documentation.solarwinds.com) Enchant's documentation caps the total attachment size per message at 10 MB, and the API requires attachments to be uploaded before the message is created. Treat 10 MB total-per-message as the safe operating limit. Files exceeding this limit should be stored externally (e.g., cloud storage) with a link in the ticket note.
Attachment edge case
SWSD's API has been reported to lack endpoints for downloading certain attachment types (particularly asset attachments). If you hit this, you may need direct database access for on-premise instances or a support request for SaaS instances.
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 Enchant can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Enchant: 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 → Enchant 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.
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Archive only
Use Enchant's managed historical import for searchable history, manually recreate only active tickets as native records.
SolarWinds Service Desk → Enchant specifics
- Cost reduction
- SWSD carries enterprise ITSM licensing costs. If your team only uses basic ticketing, you are overpaying for incident-problem-change workflows you never touch. Enchant's pricing starts significantly lower per agent. (enchant.com)
- Simplicity
- SWSD requires categorization, impact analysis, and state-machine approval workflows. Enchant removes that friction for teams that just need fast email-based support.
- Shared inbox workflow
- Enchant is designed around the shared inbox pattern — email, chat, social — which maps well to customer support teams that do not need IT service management.
- Pivoting to external support
- Companies shifting from internal IT support to external B2B/B2C customer support often find ITSM tools too rigid for client communication.
- Smaller team size
- SWSD was built for IT departments with change advisory boards. A five-person support team does not need that weight.
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 -
Export and archive
Store custom field data in a separate system (spreadsheet, database, or JSON file) linked by original SWSD incident ID. Use this for compliance, reporting, or reference needs that Enchant cannot serve.
SolarWinds Service Desk → Enchant specifics
- Incidents
- Total count, status distribution, date range
- Service Requests
- Separate from incidents in SWSD; both map to tickets in Enchant. Distinguish them post-migration using a label like service-request.
- Problems and Changes
- Do you need these in Enchant? If yes, they become tickets with distinguishing labels (problem, change). If no, archive.
- Users (Agents)
- Active agents who need accounts in Enchant
- Attachments
- Count and total size; check for inline images vs. file attachments. Note: any individual file over 10 MB will need to be handled separately (see attachment size limits below).
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 → Enchant 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 → Enchant 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 Enchant 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.
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Flatten into a note
Create an internal note on each ticket with all custom field values formatted as key-value pairs. Preserves the data but makes it unsearchable via Enchant's search. Best for ticket-level fields like "affected system" or "business unit."
JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet -
Flatten into customer summary
For customer-level custom fields (e.g., "contract tier," "account manager"), use Enchant's summary field on the customer record. Limited to a single text field per customer — format as structured text.
Data Format Converter Reshape the export into the format Enchant's importer expects
SolarWinds Service Desk → Enchant specifics
- Custom fields
- List every custom field, its type, and whether it is still in use. Typical SWSD instances have 10–40 custom fields across incidents and service requests; each one requires a mapping decision.
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 Enchant sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Enchant 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 Enchant'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 Enchant, 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 Enchant'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 Enchant 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 Enchant, 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.
SolarWinds Service Desk Enchant
| SolarWinds Service Desk field | Enchant field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Incident | Ticket | Primary migration target |
| Service Request | Ticket | Tag with label service-request to distinguish from incidents |
| Problem | Ticket (optional) | Tag with label problem; add note referencing linked incident IDs |
| Change | Ticket (optional) | Tag with label change; add note referencing linked incident IDs |
| User (Agent) | User | Map by email; create manually in Enchant before migration |
| Requester | Customer | Create with Contacts via API |
| Department | Inbox or Label | Use inboxes if departments map to distinct support teams; labels otherwise |
| Category / Subcategory | Label | Flatten into labels (e.g., category:network, subcategory:vpn) |
| Site | Label | No direct equivalent; use labels like site:nyc-office |
| Comment (public) | Message (reply) | Set direction based on author role |
| Comment (private) | Message (note) | Internal note |
| Attachment | Attachment | Upload as base64 via POST /attachments, link to message via attachment_ids |
| Custom field | Note on ticket or Customer summary | No custom field support in Enchant API |
| Asset / CI | None | Archive separately |
| Knowledge Base Article | Knowledge Base (manual) | No import API; recreate manually or via assisted workflow |
| Task | Note or archive | Task API support may be limited in Task Management v2 |
level mapping for Incidents Tickets
| SolarWinds Service Desk field | Enchant field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| id | (internal reference) | Store mapping in crosswalk table for relationship rebuilding |
| name (incident title) | subject | Direct map |
| state | state | Map: New/Assigned→open, On Hold/Awaiting Input→hold, Resolved/Closed→closed |
| requester.email | customer (lookup/create) | Create customer with contact first |
| assignee.email | user_id | Lookup by email in Enchant via GET /users |
| category.name | label_ids | Create label via POST /labels, attach to ticket |
| subcategory.name | label_ids | Create label via POST /labels, attach to ticket |
| priority | label_ids | Enchant has no priority field; use labels like priority-high, priority-medium, priority-low |
| impact / urgency | label_ids or note | Flatten impact/urgency matrices into simple priority labels or include in metadata note |
| due_at | Note | Enchant tickets have no due date field; include in metadata note |
| created_at | Note (metadata) | See callout below |
| description / description_body | First message body | Create as inbound reply with direction: "in" |
| comments | Messages | Public comments → replies; private comments → notes |
| custom_fields_values | Note on ticket | Serialize as key-value pairs in note body |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets (Incidents/Service Requests) | medium | Incidents and service requests can be mapped to Enchant tickets via API, but all ITSM-specific metadata such as impact, urgency, and category hierarchies must be flattened or discarded. |
| Contacts (Requesters) | low | SWSD requesters map relatively cleanly to Enchant customers with contacts, and customers must be created before tickets to preserve relationships. |
| Agents (Users) | low | Active agents can be provisioned in Enchant directly, though role and permission models differ between the two platforms. |
| Custom Fields | high | Enchant has no custom fields on tickets and only a single summary field on customers, so SWSD's typically 10–40 custom fields per instance must be serialized into notes, the customer summary, or archived externally. |
| Message/Comment History | medium | Ticket comments can be migrated as messages within Enchant tickets via the API, but internal notes, audit logs, and approval chain metadata may not have direct equivalents. |
| Attachments | medium | Attachments require downloading from SWSD and re-uploading as base64 to Enchant, with files over 10 MB needing separate handling and inline images requiring special attention. |
| Problems and Changes | high | Enchant has no equivalent objects for problems or changes, so these must either be converted into labeled tickets with significant metadata loss or archived outside the platform. |
| Assets and CMDB | high | Enchant has no asset management or CMDB functionality whatsoever, meaning all configuration items, dependency mappings, and asset records must remain in SWSD or be migrated to a separate system. |
| Knowledge Base Articles | high | Enchant has a built-in knowledge base but no import API, requiring manual recreation of all articles which becomes impractical for collections exceeding roughly 50 articles. |
| SLA Configuration | medium | SWSD's full SLA management with escalation rules and per-priority response/resolution targets must be simplified to Enchant's basic per-inbox response time targets, losing granular escalation logic. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Custom Fields Have No Equivalent
SWSD supports extensive custom fields on all object types, but Enchant exposes only a single customer summary text field and no custom fields on tickets via API, forcing all custom field data into ticket body notes or external archives.
ITSM Object Model Collapse
Incidents, service requests, problems, changes, and releases in SWSD must all be flattened into Enchant's single ticket type, requiring label-based differentiation and the permanent loss of relational links between ITSM object types.
Historical Import Is Read-Only
Enchant's managed historical import creates read-only records excluded from reports and live folders, so any tickets that agents need to continue working on post-cutover must be created as native tickets through the API.
Rate Limits Constrain Throughput
Enchant enforces a rate limit of 100 credits per minute with a burst limit of 6 requests per second, and SWSD limits API calls to 100 per minute on Essentials plans, making large-scale migrations time-intensive.
Attachment Re-Upload Complexity
Attachments must be downloaded from SWSD and re-uploaded to Enchant as base64-encoded payloads, with individual files over 10 MB requiring separate handling due to size limits.
Knowledge Base Has No Import API
Enchant provides no API for importing knowledge base articles, so SWSD articles must be manually recreated or transferred through a script-assisted copy-paste workflow with formatting adjustments.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I migrate custom fields from SolarWinds Service Desk to Enchant?
No. Enchant's API does not support custom fields on tickets. The best workaround is to serialize custom field values into an internal note on each ticket, or store customer-level data in Enchant's customer summary field. Any data that doesn't fit must be archived externally.
Can agents keep working tickets after Enchant imports them?
Not via Enchant's documented historical import. Imported tickets are read-only, not visible in live folders, and excluded from reports. If agents need active-ticket continuity, you must create native Enchant tickets through the API or use a custom managed migration.
Does Enchant support importing tickets with original creation dates?
The Enchant API does not expose created_at as a writable field when creating tickets. Migrated tickets will show the import date. Work around this by including the original creation date in a metadata note or the ticket subject line.
What are Enchant's API rate limits for data migration?
Enchant enforces 100 credits per minute per account with a burst limit of 6 requests per second. At roughly 3-4 API calls per ticket, expect to migrate about 25-30 tickets per minute. A 10,000-ticket migration takes approximately 6 hours.
How long does a SolarWinds Service Desk to Enchant migration take?
For datasets under 10,000 tickets, expect 1-2 days including testing. Larger datasets (50,000+) may take 3-5 days due to Enchant's rate limits. Building and testing the migration script itself typically takes one engineer a few days for straightforward cases.