Service desk
The service desk is where your team hears about problems and works them to a finish. Endpoints raise alerts, technicians declare incidents when a problem affects a service, end users ask for help with tickets and live chat from the Outpost tray app, and customers read a public status page. This page explains each part, how they connect, and which plans include them.
The parts
Section titled “The parts”| Part | What it is | Where it is in the console |
|---|---|---|
| Alerts | A record of a condition on an endpoint, such as low free space on one of its drives or a stopped service, and the notifications sent about it. | Alerts |
| Incidents | A problem with a service your users depend on, run by a commander, with updates you publish to a status page and its subscribers. | Incidents |
| Status pages | A public page that shows the state of your services, open incidents, and planned maintenance, readable without signing in. | Incidents > Status page |
| Tickets | A request or problem from one person, worked in queues against service level agreements. | Tickets |
| Live chat | A conversation an end user starts from the tray app and a technician takes from the console. | Chat |
| Workflows | Rules that work tickets without a technician: on a ticket event, on a 5-minute check, on a schedule, or when tickets pile up. | Tickets > Workflows, or Inbox > Workflows on the MSP plan |
On the MSP plan, each client has its own alerts, incidents, tickets, and chats. The Inbox lists every client’s tickets and alerts in one place, and Estate status holds incidents that affect every client at once. See MSP.
How the parts connect
Section titled “How the parts connect”Work moves between the parts in a few fixed ways:
- Alert to incident. When an alert turns out to be one symptom of a wider outage, a technician selects Promote to incident on the alert. The incident opens with the alert linked to it, and more alerts can be linked later.
- Ticket to incident. When several people report the same outage, each ticket can be attached to the incident from the ticket’s Related tab.
- Chat to ticket. A technician can raise a ticket from a chat transcript. A chat that no technician answers in time is marked missed and turned into a ticket, so the person who asked is followed up.
- Ticket to survey. When a ticket is solved, the requester is asked how it went. Their answers appear under Tickets > Satisfaction.
Alerts and incidents are deliberately separate. An alert is about one endpoint and is raised and cleared by Outpost. An incident is about a service and is declared, updated, and resolved by a person, because what customers are told needs a human decision.
Alerts are on every plan. Everything else in this section is the service desk, which Enterprise and MSP include.
| Part | Home Lab | Essentials | Enterprise | MSP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alerts, alert rules, and notification channels | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Live chat from the tray app | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Promote an alert to an incident | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Incidents, components, maintenance, and status pages | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tickets, queues, workflows, canned responses, and SLAs | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tickets from the tray app, and Raise a ticket from a chat | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tickets from email (support mailboxes) | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Satisfaction surveys | No | No | Yes | Yes |
On a plan without the service desk, the Incidents and Tickets sections show a lock to owners and are hidden from everyone else, and the tray app refuses ticket submissions and does not offer live chat. See Plan-locked features and Plans and limits.
Support mailboxes turn email into tickets and send your replies back as email. See Email to ticket.
Related
Section titled “Related”Content is licensed CC BY 4.0. Code samples are MIT. Outpost and the Outpost mark are trademarks of Outpost Business Solutions, PBC and are not covered by either license.