Manageengine Automation

[Yogprasad Moneta]

ADManagerPlus' automation feature lets you automate or semi-automate the execution of certain crucial routine tasks in an organization.The following sections describe how to get started with automation.

Administrators have preset routine (run book) tasks to perform either during network faults or as an ongoing maintenance task. These maintenance tasks include checking critical servers, services, and more. When the network has hundreds of devices (usually more), this maintenance process becomes daunting for the network admins as it requires substantial amount of resources and time. Luckily, with the help of network automation workflow, these repetitive, laborious maintenance tasks can now be simplified. Apart from the maintenance tasks, IT admins can design and automate workflows to troubleshoot network issues.

An IT workflow automation tool comes in handy when the network is large and constantly multiplying its resources. Just with any other software, the workflow automation software too has some challenges. The real challenge with most workflow automation tools is that they are not tightly integrated with the NMS. This is why installing a network monitoring solution that has a well-integrated and robust workflow automation platform is crucial.

ManageEngine OpManager is a powerful network monitoring solution with a tightly coupled IT automation workflow. With OpManager's enterprise workflow automation, you can start/stop/resume services, processes, and automate other tasks with over 70 workflow actions based on user-defined conditions.

Over 70 workflow checks and actions grouped under 9 different categories, including VMware ESX actions are available for you to construct a powerful workflow rule to suit your IT management need. Just create workflows using these out-of-the-box checks and actions to the workflow builder and you are good to go.

The intuitive drag-n-drop workflow builder makes it simple to create new workflow rules for every administrator. Besides defining new workflows, you can modify an existing workflow by making changes to the conditions or actions inside the workflow builder.

The application of IT run book automation can be initiated when there is a network fault, or as ongoing maintenance tasks, or even on an ad-hoc basis. OpManager IT workflow automation module gives you the free hand to trigger workflow in all the aforementioned situations.

Every executed workflow is recorded under "Execution logs" for future audits. This report comes handy when the administrators want to make sure what has happened during a particular workflow execution.

There are many operations that are performed in a service desk before a ticket is closed; it starts with ticket creation, then assignment, categorization, and finally ticket closure?and every step is an opportunity to leverage automation. With the growing intelligence of automations, setting up a hands-free service desk where technicians can focus their attention on troubleshooting issues and other tasks that require their attention is absolutely possible.

By automating various service desk processes with ServiceDesk Plus, you can shift the responsibility of handling repetitive and simple tasks such as assignment, automated notification, and categorization away from your technicians and let them focus on more important tasks. Automations in ServiceDesk Plus help reduce errors and costs to ensure a faster turnaround in your ticket management processes.

From leveraging multi-channel support including shifting left with intelligent chatbots to smart knowledge base article suggestions, ServiceDesk Plus automations can help you change customer experiences and improve end-user satisfaction. By setting the right expectations with service-level agreements (SLAs), resolving tickets sooner by improving first call resolutions (FCRs), sending out timely updates with automated notifications, and collecting feedback using the built-in survey module, you can provide personalized support to your end users that can improve customer satisfaction with

every passing ticket.

By using ServiceDesk Plus automations like Request Life Cycle (RLC) and mandatory fields, you can reduce technician errors like incorrect ticket progression and incomplete resolutions to ensure that all tickets are resolved consistently without missing any fields or deviating from the ticket workflow.

Business rules are condition-based actions that help you automate various ticket actions. Routing tickets to specific technician groups based on subject lines and changing ticket parameters like priority based on the ticket category are just some of the automations you can perform using business rules.

Eliminate the need to assign tickets to technicians manually. The technician auto-assign can be set up to follow a round robin or load balancing algorithm, ensuring that tickets are distributed to technicians on time, efficiently, and equally. You can also set up exceptions for the auto-assign.

You don't have to keep sending out repetitive email notifications to stakeholders anymore! The automatic notifications in ServiceDesk Plus do it for you. Ensure that the necessary notifications reach stakeholders on time, and increase customer satisfaction with timely updates about their ticket status.

Reduce the number of unresolved and overdue tickets with a robust SLA management system. With ServiceDesk Plus, you can create multiple SLAs for different types of tickets with unique response and resolution times. Proactive and reactive SLA notifications ensure that no tickets are forgotten, and with up to four levels of escalations, you can ensure that all tickets end up getting the necessary attention!

Let Zia take care of your basic ticketing functions, and give your end users the power to solve everyday tasks without depending on technicians. Zia is also available with the mobile app, and extends your service desk functionalities beyond your office space.

Stay informed on all the operations that happen in your service desk, and keep a record of all the tickets your service desk has worked on. Configure the time period after which your data is archived, and forget about having to manually archive data!

Build visual workflows to ensure that all your requests go through a standard set of actions before they're closed. You can create multiple unique workflows for different ticket types, and associate these life cycles to

ticket templates.

ServiceDesk Plus gives you the freedom to create and run your own custom scripts. This opens up a whole new world of automation options. Easy-to-use configurations enable you to run your custom scripts directly from within the ServiceDesk Plus user interface (UI).

Service desk automation enables IT teams to automate various actions throughout the ticket life cycle, from creation to closure. For example, they can categorize, prioritize, and assign them to the right groups. By automating routine tasks, IT teams can save time and manual effort to focus on business-critical tasks.

With automation, IT teams can ensure consistency in service desk operations across the enterprise. This way, they can ensure process adherence by minimizing deviations. Also, they can save time and manual effort, and focus on vital tasks. It boosts the productivity of IT teams and elevates user experiences for employees in the organization.

IT infrastructure automation is the process of reducing human intervention by using technology to control and manage the software, hardware, storage, and other network components that constitute an IT infrastructure. The objective is to build a highly efficient, reliable IT environment.

Offering a seamless digital experience to both customers and employees has become a business imperative. Behind the screen, this translates to maintaining a high-performance network around the clock without increasing operational costs.

Yet attaining this critical combination of objectives is not possible without automating operational tasks and work-arounds that are prone to errors, inefficiencies, and inconsistencies. This holds particularly true for enterprise IT as the degree of these risks increases at scale.

Constituting a huge part of managing your IT infrastructure, network provisioning involves getting all the network components in place and ready to use. This includes deploying hardware, installing software, configuring devices, setting up notification profiles, and making sure everything is up and running. But manually performing all these tasks every time a device gets added is mechanical and highly repetitive, especially on an enterprise scale.

Also, you can use automation in the network configuration backup process, a key configuration management procedure for maintaining network stability. Along with performing scheduled and manual backups, an automation tool helps by triggering a backup whenever it detects any device configuration change. This change-triggered backup feature ensures no configuration change goes unrecorded, resulting in more consistent network services.

Fault management is meant to be as proactive as possible to avoid any network disruptions, from minor to costly. Here, being proactive means getting notified in advance about any potential network issues. Automation can help you discover such bottlenecks before they disrupt the network.

For example, any network has a risk of a unique IP address being allocated to more than one device. If one of them is a critical device, this will not only affect it but also the dependent devices, cascading to become a network catastrophe. A network management tool with an automated scanning capability can detect such conflicts and alert you in advance.

Additionally, you can automate processes that do not demand much human intelligence, like L1 troubleshooting and routine maintenance tasks. This will increase the overall efficiency of operations in terms of time, effort, and cost.

In dynamic IT environments, the one-size-fits-all approach does not hold true for configuring alert thresholds. Also, continually modifying the thresholds manually based on the usage across all devices is close to impossible.

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