Managed networks require the ability to respond, reacting to alerts by raising tickets and enabling diagnosis and remediation. For Meraki, alerts are raised via API and can be configured to create Autotask PSA tickets manually – or you can use AlertMagic to do that for you.
Whichever route you choose, there are some decisions ahead of you to make life easier. Here are some top tips for getting started:
- Set a title to make the ticket easily recognisable
- Assign a description that allows identification of the root cause
- Assign to the appropriate work queue
- Assign the subissue type based on the device type
- Associate the ticket with the relevant customer or organisation
- Set an appropriate service level
- Calculate the due date for response based on priority rules
The ability to react to incidents should be your starting point. But this can leave you with several important challenges:
- Too many tickets. Your service desk teams are easily overwhelmed by the noise, But if you filter too hard – you risk missing important notifications.
- Your workflow is still incredibly inefficient. Each ticket has to be checked manually, and the diagnosis is involved and time-consuming.
- Warning notifications are ignored, because your teams are too bust dealing with urgent-important incidents. But could they be avoided if you took heed of the warnings? And what would that mean for service quality?
- Playbooks require trusted engineers to execute. These quickly become a chore.
- You’re still working reactively. To become proactive, incident patterns should inform a problem management process, that helps identify potential issues before they arise.
This is where the advanced functionality of AlertMagic can really add value. You see, handing alerts is really just the first step. To continue to automate, and improve service quality, you should configure:
- Ticket de-duplication rules, this can reduce the amount of noise in your inbox by over 90% in some cases
- Ticket enrichment: What data do you need embedded into your ticket to support diagnostics?
- Do you want to configure auto-remediation rules, for example rebooting a problem router on certain signals
- Problem management rules – how can you correlate incidents together to create problem tickets, and route that to the proper queue.
More to come…