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Create Regular Scheduled Jobs in the KACE Service Desk

On occasions as we work with Dell KACE customers we get requests for different functionality, one such request that comes up fairly regularly is the ability to log regular tickets on the Service Desk against a schedule. The main purpose being to allocate time to a regular job or routine, and to make sure that time is captured and managed by IT staff in the correct way. One such example of a task would be the daily changing of back up tapes in servers, this was requested again by a customer the other day, so we sat down to work through the issue and see if we could muster up a solution. See the steps below:

1. Create a specific Ticket Category

In the Service desk Queue first create a category that matches your task, in this case Scheduled Tasks::Backup Tapes

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Make sure that the "User Settable" box is un-ticked so that tickets cannot be mis-categorised

2. Create a Simple Report

Go into your reports area and create, using the wizard a simple report that gives you the following fields:
  • Ticket ID
  • Ticket Title
  • Ticket Owner
  • Date Created
  • Ticket Status
In the final section of creating the reports select the following

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So that you have a summary report of only your open calls regarding Tape Changes, name it something like "Daily Tape Backup Summary"

3. Create Your Helpdesk incoming email account as a User

Within the Settings>Users area create a new user that has the same email address as your alt email or incoming email address for your Service Desk queue. This is so that it can be selected later in this process

4.Create A Report Schedule

Go to the Reporting section of your Dell KACE box and find the report created earlier in the process "Daily Tape Backup Summary"
From the report listing screen, click on the Blue Bell Icon next to the Report title to add a schedule.

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Within the schedule set the email subject to something suitable eg "Daily Tape Backup Request"

Select your Service Desk email account as the recipient

Add a message eg "Please change the backup tapes on all servers"

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And finally set your schedule as to when the ticket needs to be logged, this can be done as a custom schedule if you only want a ticket logging Monday - Friday.
The following image shows the schedule as 16:45 Monday to Friday.

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This now means that every week day a report will be emailed into your Service Desk and a new ticket will be created on the queue.

5. Create a Custom Ticket Rule

The final step is to create a Ticket rule that will allocate the ticket to the correct technician for action and closure. Create a ticket rule using the following:

  • If Title is equal to Daily Tape Backup Request 
  • If Category is equal to "Scheduled Tasks::Backup Tapes"
  • If the Status is New (or whatever your default is set to)
If all of the above criteria is set, then set the Owner to your Allocated Technician.

Finally set the rule to run on a daily basis, but leave the time until 10 or 15 minutes after the report schedule is set to run.

The result is that every day a ticket is created in your Service Desk Queue and it is allocated to a technician for action, against which you can record time and effort when closing the ticket, which in turn can be reported on a weekly or monthly basis. 

Comments

  • Brilliant. - TheNakedNinja 9 years ago
  • Seems like a great idea but i cannot seem to get it to work. I cc'd my email on the report and receive that, but nothing is created in the helpdesk. Please Help....... - bstutz 9 years ago
  • Is there any way to create these scheduled jobs and have them occur every year? and even send out reminders before the due date? - bstutz 8 years ago
  • This was an extremely helpful article. I would like to expand the functionality by being able to populate fields in the ticket automatically. This already can be done with the @ commands sending an e-mail. The problem here is the e-mail that is sent with the report, the first line of the e-mail contains the name of the report, so the @ commands do not work (they need to be first in the body). Any way to configure an e-mailed report so that it does not put the report title in the first line of the e-mail? - tcary 7 years ago
  • Is this still working on 11+, as I can not seem to get the service desk to create a ticket? - kstaley 3 years ago
    • We have taken this further for some customers, setting up a queue to control the schedules and emailing into the main support queue with the correct data in the correct fields. If you would like to see more please reach out to me directly and we can setup a call. - Hobbsy 3 years ago
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