Master Ticketing in Atera

Webinar transcript

Lee: Um, okay, so thank you all for coming to the webinar. My name is Lee, and I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Atera. Thank you for joining. I’m joined by a couple of my colleagues today: Abigael and Sheina, who are also Customer Success Managers. Alongside us, we have a very special guest, Yakov, our Product Manager for the entire ticketing aspect of Atera. He’s going to help us out and will be a part of our Q&A session at the end of this meeting. Let me just share my screen and show you what the agenda looks like for today.

Alright, so first things first, we’re going to walk through a couple of different important items. The primary focus of today’s webinar will be on custom fields, ticket forms, ticket automation rules, and reporting. Today is the advanced ticketing webinar, so these are aspects of the ticketing side of the platform that may be a little bit underused or require a more in-depth explanation. At the very end, we’ll have a Q&A with Yakov to understand what the future of Atera ticketing looks like and maybe talk a little bit about the roadmap. Feel free to ask more high-level questions as well.

Let’s get started. I’m going to hop into the platform, and the first thing that we’re going to see is the regular ticketing page that you should all be accustomed to. The first topic that we’re going to be discussing is custom fields. Right now, you’re all pretty much familiar with the flow of how to open a ticket and how to respond to tickets in your daily tasks. But what if you want to go one step further? Maybe you want your technicians to be able to respond to tickets that have additional fields. Here we actually have the option of creating custom fields that you’ve added to the ticketing page. We have some examples, like a department view, a teams view, or maybe a form. We’re going to show you exactly how to create these custom fields. The way you do it is by going into Admin and Custom Fields. Here you see the Custom Fields view, and on this page, you have the option of creating custom fields pretty much anywhere within the platform. But today, we’re going to focus on the ticketing side. Here we have the default fields. As the name implies, these fields already exist within your current ticketing system. However, you can also make some adjustments. For example, on the status, you have your normal views, but you also have the option of creating additional statuses. In addition to closed or pending, you can create custom statuses, like awaiting manager approval, and assign it to behavior, whether it be open, pending, or closed. The real meat and potatoes lie within the actual custom fields that you can add that weren’t there previously. Let’s see what those look like. We have a couple of examples here, like product family and device type. Let’s actually create one from scratch to see what it looks like. We’re going to click on Custom Fields and choose our target, which is the ticket page. Now we can choose what kind of field to create, whether it be a text-based field, a number, a checkbox, or maybe a dropdown with dependencies. Let’s do an example. Let’s create a checkbox and label it “Manager Approval.” Now, when we return to the ticket page, we’ll see that that little box has been added to the ticket page. Let’s go back and show you some other examples before we move on. An example of a dropdown with dependencies would be the product family category that we’ve created earlier. You can create values and child values that will populate immediately when you click on the dropdown. For instance, under product family, you have Office 365, backup software, software installation, hardware, and other options that you can add to the ticketing page.

Now that we’ve discussed how to add custom fields to regular tickets, it’s also important to recognize that custom fields can be created on the customer portal, which leads us to our next topic: ticket forms. Most of you are probably aware that tickets can be created in many ways within Atera. Email is probably the most popular way, but the next most popular way is through the customer portal. If you provide your users with a customer portal, they’ll be able to create tickets through there. The real benefit here is that you can take advantage of ticket forms, which are ticket templates that you create for your users to fill out. This can help create different processes and dictate how your users can open specific tickets. It’s pretty hard to explain to a user how you want your ticket opened in an email, so we’re going to demonstrate custom fields on the customer portal as well. Before we do that, note that if we want to customize what the customer portal looks like, all we have to do is go into the little pencil icon and specify whether or not it’s a required field or visible on the customer portal. The same thing is true for the statuses; you can alter their visibility in the customer portal as well. This is what the customer portal looks like. Users have the option to make the title, impact, and other fields visible. They can open up a ticket here just like they would by email. The benefit is that you can use these custom fields to alter which ticket form you’d like to create. For example, let’s go to ticket forms and see what it looks like to create a ticket form from scratch. Let’s select a new template. Here are the default fields that we have available. Let’s say we want to create a form for customer onboarding. We’ll call it “Onboarding Form for Webinar.” We can choose some ticket fields to add. This is where the custom fields come in. Your custom fields will populate in these additional fields that you can add. For instance, we want to onboard our customers, so we might add a product family, specify the department they’re in, and the device type they prefer, whether it’s a Windows machine or a Mac. Let’s create that. Now, back in our portal, let’s refresh to make sure. When we go into the forms page, we’ll see our onboarding form appear. When we click on it, all the different fields that we’ve specified will be there, including the product family dropdown. We can add Microsoft 365, specify it’s a sales user who uses PowerPoint a lot, and enter the information. Let’s show you what that looks like. Request and save. The ticket was created. Now, when we go back into the tickets page, we’ll see that the ticket was created with the ticket form that we specified. # Ticket Automation Rules Let’s move on to the next topic, which is ticket automation rules. What are ticket automation rules? Ticket automation rules are different sets of automations that you can assign to your ticketing system to automate certain behaviors. There are a lot of examples for ticket automation rules, so we’re going to go through a couple of them today. Let’s make an example of a time-based ticket rule. Let’s say you want to escalate a ticket to a manager if the status is open for more than a week, just as an example.

Let’s go to a new rule and call it “Escalate to Manager.” We can give it a description, so let’s put “Exceeds One Week.” We want the trigger to be “Status Changed” because we’re assuming the status hasn’t changed. You kind of have to think about it both ways. Let’s click “Add” and now think about how we can create ticket automation rules. You can think of these as basically “if” statements, which is the best way to approach it. Let’s go to the ticket property and select “Status” because we’re considering the status that hasn’t changed. We’ll click on “Equals” and then select “Open” because the ticket is still open. Let’s add that condition. Now we have one condition: the ticket status equals open. But we also want to specify that we want this to happen after one week. So let’s add another condition. Click “Add” and then go to “Hours Since Status Changed.” We’ll select “Equals” and “Open.” I did a little bit of math before this webinar, so I know that one week is 168 hours. Let’s add that condition. Now that we’ve specified our conditions, we can define the action type. Let’s set a field value and find “Technician.” The value should be to select the admin or the manager. In this instance, let’s choose myself and click “Add.” The rule is now ready to go. Whenever a ticket remains open for this amount of time, the technician will be notified. This is just one example of how to utilize ticket automation rules. We have many different examples of actions you can take. Let’s go over one more. 

Based on Keywords Let’s do a simple one: assigning a ticket based on a keyword or a destination email. We’ll call it “Assign Ticket Based on Keywords.” For the description, let’s put the same thing. The trigger will be “New Ticket Created” because we’re categorizing the ticket when it’s created. Click “Add.” For the ticket property, let’s choose the destination email. Hold on, let’s actually do the destination email and then the ticket title. We’ll select “Equals” and choose which support address it wants to come from. It must match. Now we can assign the value to the technician. Depending on the email address the ticket came from, we can automatically assign it to this person. # Additional Examples and Email Templates One other thing to specify is that ticket automation rules can also send email templates with these automated actions. Email templates can be created within Atera. You can have a dropdown, a snippet list, create a subject matter, and choose which tickets to create and add to ticket automation rules. 

Now we’re going to hop into the next topic, which is reporting. Now that we’ve understood how to create tickets with custom fields, use ticket forms, and ticket automation rules, let’s try to understand how we track all of this within Atera’s reporting system. We have multiple tiers of reporting within Atera. We have the classic reports, which everyone should be familiar with. We also have advanced reports, which can be found on the second tier or higher of Atera plans. Let’s take a look at what that looks like. We have several pre-built reports on the advanced reports page. Let’s give an example. Here we have a customer tickets overview with various helpful numbers and graphs. Let’s say we want to create a filter to see tickets between certain dates. We can choose a date range, such as March 2024, select the priority of tickets, and the severity. While we don’t have severity here, we can choose the customer name and run the report to get specified information. This is a basic way of using advanced reporting to understand customer tickets. I’d also like to demonstrate how to use custom reporting, which is found on the third tier or higher of plans. It allows you to create reports from scratch with the databases within Atera. 

To create a custom report, click on “New Report” and select which database to work with. We have databases related to agents, devices, and tickets. You can use these to create ticket reports from scratch. Let’s focus on ticket custom fields because we already talked about custom fields and can do something more complex. For those familiar with Looker, Google’s BI tool, you’ll feel right at home. For those who aren’t, don’t panic; it’s not as scary as it looks. All fields are listed out in a handy way with dropdowns, and you can search for whatever field you’d like. Let’s create a ticketing report with important information. We’ll start with the ticket created date because we want to know when the ticket was created. Click on “Date.” Let’s add another field, such as the ticket number, to get more information. Every time you click on a field, it adds to the report. At the end, we’ll run the report. Next, let’s add ticket priority and ticket title. Now let’s run the report to see what it looks like. We have a report that shows the date of creation, the ticket number, the priority, and the ticket title. You can save the report to a new dashboard or an existing dashboard, schedule the report, download it to your computer, immediately remove fields, and refresh your view. 

Let’s say we want to view custom fields as well, not just the fields already built into the platform. How do we do that? Let’s take a look. We’ll search for “Field Name” to understand the field. Click on that and select “Ticket Custom Fields.” Let’s add “Field Value” and pivot the report to get a better view. Remember when we showed off the product value custom field? Let’s look for “Ticket Custom Fields” and select “Field Name.” Let’s look for “Product Family” and run the report to see what we get. Now we have a report that shows not only the fields included within the ticketing database but also the custom fields we’ve added to our tickets. This provides a high-level view of what your ticketing looks like. Let’s save this report to an existing dashboard. Go to a group, select “My Dashboard,” and save it. I’ll show you what that looks like. Go to “My Dashboard,” which acts as a little command center where you can see all of your custom reports and fields.

Lee: So, in terms of the reports that you’ve created, you can see that I have one for antivirus, one for a personal ticketing dashboard, and one for tickets with custom fields, which is the one that I’ve just created. It includes the product family and all the different ticket attributes. Now I can save it and have this at my disposal at all times. I can favorite it and take advantage of this really handy feature. 

With that, we’ve pretty much covered all the major topics that I wanted to cover. Now we have a little bit of time for Q&A, so I’m going to tag in our PM Yakov, and he’s going to help us with some questions. Do we have anything interesting? 

Yakov: Awesome, thank you, Lee. We did have some questions during the webinar. We’ve already answered all of them, but if you guys have anything else—any roadmap questions or any functional questions—we would love to take those as well. So drop them in the Q&A section. We’re looking forward to them. Keep in mind, this is a good opportunity to ask not just functionality questions but high-level questions. It’s not every day that we get Yakov on a call, so let’s take advantage of this opportunity. Maybe there are features that you’re not sure are in the platform and you want to check if they’re there, or maybe some functionalities that you’re wondering if they’re on the roadmap or not. 

Lee: While we’re waiting, I’ll take a moment to show a couple of other things that we’re able to do in the platform, which relate to what you guys were showing, to what I was showing. Just need to figure out where I can share my screen in this platform. 

Yakov: On the left, you have a screen. 

Lee: Ah, there we go, perfect. 

Yakov: And also, not to interrupt, but maybe you could also talk a little bit about the upcoming Teams integration? 

Lee: Oh yeah, absolutely. Looks like I need to give this app some permissions, so just a moment. I will actually have to log in again, so I’ll be here in a second. 

Yakov: No worries, just reopen my web browser. Can I see you in a second? 

Lee: Yep. Okay, really appreciate the whole team over at Atera. Thank you, Michael, I appreciate that. That’s very kind of you. Let’s see what other things we’ve got on here. Can you make certain fields mandatory? 

Yakov: Absolutely, yes. On the field itself, there is a place to select if you want the field to be mandatory or not, both on the customer portal and on the ticketing page. 

Lee: I see Yakov is back with us. 

Yakov: Hey everybody, I am back, just logging into my Atera instance. Okay, perfect, and now I should be able to share my screen. Nice. Alright, so there was a question during the presentation from Mo, I believe, which was talking about custom fields. What I wanted to show you is that when you’re creating your different forms, you can choose one of the forms to be the default one. For example, here I will choose this form that I call “Default” as my default one because I chose not to have any custom fields in it. That way, whenever you’re getting tickets from an email or any other external services, you’ll make sure you don’t have any custom fields because obviously when something comes in from an email, your clients or users can’t really choose the form. But then once you or any of the technicians open a ticket manually or someone does it from the portal, you can then choose, for example, I have an equipment request form here, and you will have the relevant fields. It’s a best practice that we recommend here. 

Did we have any other questions? 

Lee: Hamza is asking how do ticket types work? Do you have options such as incident, problem, request, and change? 

Yakov: Yes, absolutely. We follow the ITIL protocol, so when you’re opening a ticket or if you go into any of your existing ones, you will see the incident, problem, request, and change values in there. 

Lee: Sean was asking, is there a way to change what metrics display on the Atera dashboard for tickets? 

Yakov: The dashboard itself is customizable. All of these elements can be changed in their size and location. You can play around with them, turn off some of the modules that are less interesting for you, and reset to the default. This is the view per technician. Also, on the roadmap, we want to introduce the ability to customize these widgets, insert new ones, and we’re constantly working on improving this. If you have any suggestions, we have a very good features board. For those of you who don’t know or are still trialing Atera or if you’re just not aware, you can press your avatar here and go to the features board. Over there, you will see everything that’s being discussed by the community. We, the product managers and the customer success team, constantly look at it and prioritize a lot of the development based on it. 

Lee: Thank you for that. We do have another question: Do you have recommendations for setting up the ticketing system for the first time? 

Yakov: First off, I would recommend going into the email settings and specifying your support email address. This allows you to generate the process by which tickets are created through email. We can send a knowledge-based article for that. We also have another knowledge-based article on how to set up the customer portal. In addition to those two, we have another way of creating a ticket that I think is very handy called the Help Desk Agent, which allows you to create tickets through the app tray icon. All of those explanations are available in our knowledge base, and if one of you could send those, that would be great. 

Yakov: It looks like we have a new user here, so welcome aboard. I will also say, Christopher, I’m all up for automation, so think about the processes that you guys want to expedite and streamline in your business. Anything that needs special treatment, emails coming in from specific people in the organization, VIPs, if you guys have expertise inside the company, the automation rules are also a great way to look at that. As we mentioned, the custom statuses and all those things can really help you get better analytics about what is happening in the organization and what you guys are dealing with. Having that strong foundation in the beginning as you’re building out your help desk is very crucial because it becomes a lot harder to change once the team grows and people are used to working a certain way. Definitely look into those things in the beginning and reach out to us if you have any questions about how to do those things. 

Lee: I see someone has a request to get a quick overview of what the Teams integration is going to look like. 

Yakov: Oh yeah, absolutely. This is coming from Tom. Let me see if I have it open. You guys are seeing just my tab, so I’ll share the entire screen. This is a sneak peek of our Microsoft Teams integration. It’s almost out in beta, and we’re very excited about this. We’re looking at Microsoft Teams right now, and the integration is intended for end users. We’ve built an app, which is like a bot. The user logs in, and they’re welcomed by the organization name, Acme Group, but it will be your organization name. They can choose what they want to do: either create a ticket or view recent tickets. Let’s try to create one. Provide a title that is hopefully informative and allows you to do something actionable. I’ll say, “My computer is slow,” and then a description: “I tried starting it, but it didn’t work.” Click submit, and the user will be prompted that the ticket is created. Hopefully, it works as I said it’s still in testing. I see it’s taking a little time. Oh, something went wrong. Let’s try again. This is proof that we’re doing this live; it’s not pre-recorded. There we go. Thanks, the ticket was created. Now we can go back to Atera, to our tickets list, and hopefully, again, this is live, I see the ticket was created twice, so we had the wrong indication, but this is the first one.

Yakov: I tried to open the ticket, and we have the title as we said and the text that the user wrote. From here, the technician can obviously respond, and then we’re sending a webhook to the end user to let them know, “Hey, there’s a new comment on your ticket.” That way, they’re notified immediately in Teams, and they can write back to you. You can have a back-and-forth conversation. Another thing we can do is either create a new ticket or go back to the main menu. From there, we can also look at our tickets. By clicking “View Tickets,” the user can specify a specific ticket they want to look at or see all of their tickets. This is a little buggy as we’re still working on cleaning this HTML, but you can see some of the tickets that I have opened. We can also see the ticket we just opened. This one says, “My computer is slow,” and the last comment was, “I tried restarting it, but it didn’t work.” From here, the end user can also add another comment if they want to. TJ: Is there an additional fee for the Teams add-on? 

As I said, this is still in testing, and the commercial side of things is also not finalized, so I do not have a final answer for you. But we’ll be sure to update once we go to beta testing and release this out there. 

Lee: Any other questions, guys? Did we miss anything in the meantime? 

Yakov: Jared asked, “We got two tickets created when one comes in. Where can we check to fix this?” 

Lee: Jared, I would say reach out to our support team. They’re available 24/7. If you haven’t yet, you can open a live chat or email them at [email protected]. I would recommend the live chat as they’re very fast. It sounds like a bug, and it shouldn’t happen. 

Yakov: Perfect. Anything else? We’re coming up a little bit on time, but we probably have time for maybe one or two more questions if you guys have any. 

Lee: Just as a heads up, if you have any questions about anything that you’ve seen today or any of these features, feel free to reach out either to support or to your dedicated Customer Success Manager. They’d be happy to walk you through how to perform specific actions or set up specific automations. All of our team members are well-versed in these topics, so they’ll be able to help you accomplish what you want to do. 

Yakov: Maybe if we have one more minute, we can show another exciting development we’re working on, which is ticket queues. This could be interesting to some of the larger folks out there with larger teams. 

Lee: That’s a great idea. I’ll share my screen again. There we go. This is a very exciting feature. I’m very excited for this one. It’s still in development but hopefully out soon. We’re giving the option to create groups of technicians. There are two use cases for this particular feature. One would be for larger teams that have groups like Tier 1, Tier 2, Sales, etc. Here, I have a Tier 1 group. I gave them a description and added a bunch of technicians to the Tier 1 group. Some of our customers are waiting for this feature because they work based on the proficiencies of users. They would want to have a group of people doing software, a group of people doing hardware problems, people doing the onboarding and offboarding of users. That will also be possible by creating those different groups. Once a ticket comes in, let’s say this one says, “My computer’s very slow,” I can assign it to the Tier 1 group and from there assign it to the relevant technician. This is going to be very good because it’s going to be connected to the automation rules, so you can streamline all of these processes. If a ticket is incoming to the sales group or if you want to have all the tickets by default go into Tier 1, or having the HR sort of work on their queues, that will be possible. Down the line, we’re going to introduce round robins to those groups and automatic dispatching from within the group. Each person in the filters and in the different views can look at the tickets belonging to the groups that they belong to. This is also a very exciting feature to look forward to. 

Thank you for that. I think that’s pretty much it for questions. I don’t see any more. 

Yakov: Sorry, I think there’s a question that came in about the roadmap for Linux development to match the features available for Windows. 

Lee: Yes, so for those who are here for a longer time, we have a Linux agent. It’s been out there for about two years now, and we’re constantly adding more functionality to it. This quarter, we’ve added AnyDesk for Linux devices. We’ve added Linux patching, automatic patching to Linux devices. We’re also going to add Splashtop for remote connection, and there will be more and more improvements. If there’s anything specific you’re looking to see, let us know as well. 

Yakov: Great, thank you for that. I know Dion Martinez also asked about any roadmap for the PSA integration with IT Glue. Currently, right now, we have it with RMM. Anything on the roadmap for PSA integration? 

Lee: Right, so for those of you who don’t know, Atera integrates with IT Glue, which is a very good solution. You can see the documentation on our website and theirs. We haven’t considered the integration, but we’re always looking for new stuff, so it’s definitely something to look into. Again, I would encourage you to put it on the features board. That way, it gets traction, and we are looking into it.

Yakov: Perfect. Awesome, thank you everybody. 

Lee: Thank you, everybody. It was a pleasure having you attend the webinar. Like I said, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to your designated Customer Success Manager. It was great having you all here today. Until next time. 

Yakov: Bye, guys. 

Lee: Thank you, bye.