---
title: "Service desk"
description: "How alerts, incidents, tickets, and live chat fit together in the Outpost console, and which plans include each part."
url: "https://support.outpostplatform.com/service-desk/"
product: "depot"
type: "concept"
status: "draft"
ai_summary: "Overview of the Outpost service desk. Alerts (all plans) record conditions on endpoints and notify channels. Incidents, status pages, tickets, queues, workflows, SLAs, satisfaction surveys, and live chat are the service desk feature on Enterprise and MSP, including email to ticket."
source: "https://gitlab.com/outpostplatform/docs/-/edit/main/src/content/docs/service-desk/index.md"
license: "CC BY 4.0"
---

# 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

| 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](/msp/).

## 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.

## Plans

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](/depot/plan-locked-features/) and
[Plans and limits](/account/plans-and-limits/).

Support mailboxes turn email into tickets and send your replies back as
email. See [Email to ticket](/service-desk/mailboxes/).

## Related

- [Alerts](/service-desk/alerts/)
- [Incidents](/service-desk/incidents/)
- [Tickets](/service-desk/tickets/)
- [Live chat](/service-desk/live-chat/)
- [Workflows](/service-desk/workflows/)
- [Roles and permissions](/depot/roles-and-permissions/)