Meet Subject Matter Expert Ashutosh Pandey >>> ITOM Unlocked

Registered!  Some topics I’d like to hear about:

1 - Customization of the status page - ability to customize HTML,fields displayed with service item?

2 - Customization of emails sent to subscribers of a service health item.

Hey @halvorsond yes, these are recorded. You can access the previous session and many other Freshservice webinars on this page – Freshservice webinar & event recordings.

I’ve set up the Freshservice Status page for our instance, and have it running as a “Beta” right now - showing it to select stakeholders within the company.

Most of the services I’m monitoring are third-party services, which leads to several thoughts/questions:

1. I recently received a notice from one of the products that I’m tracking on the Status page, telling me about a Maintenance Window / Platform update they’re implementing later this week. To log that I had to create a Change ticket - which seems a little like overkill, as we aren’t the ones implementing the Change. So fields like Rollout Plan and Backout Plan aren’t really in our purview. How does FreshService recommend we best handle this situation?
    
2. Controlling the historic status information feels a bit… lacking.
   I added “Service A” and “Service B” to a Major Incident recently. Because of the upstream/downstream relationships in the CMDB/ITAM - a dozen other services were also added to the ticket. Most of which I stripped out, but I was ultiimately left with four services (A, B, C, D) on the ticket, as “C and D” were potentially being impacted.
   
   As I would issue updates, and the scope of the issue was better understood to only be a problem with “A and B” (and eventually only “B”) - I had to keep setting the status of these “other services” to remain in the green. Instead of having them just “remember” their last status.
   
   When we eventually resolved the ticket, I noticed that the status history for these non-impacted services showed the same “Partial Outage” status for the ENTIRE incident history (just over 24 hours), ignoring that I’d attempted to keep them “in the green” the whole time.
   
   Long-term, this means that while only two services were impacted (and only one was at fault) - I now have a history that shows FOUR services were in a partial outage for 24 hours, which inaccurately paints our services as unreliable.
   
   Is there a better way to manage these “related” services?
    
3. Lastly, I note that if I change a service between assorted statuses during an incident (moving between “degraded” (yellow), “partial outage” (orange), or “Major Outage” (red) ) - the last color selected is the ONLY color that is shown for the entire duration. This leads to two issues:
   
   First - it means we can’t show how an issue got worse, or better over time. It was either always red, or always orange/yellow.
   
   Second - When resolving a ticket tied to a Status Incident, it seems natural to set the impacted services from red/orange/yellow into the green with the last update. BUT DOING SO FLAGS THE SERVICE AS GREEN FOR THE ENTIRE DURATION.
   
   And of course, there’s no way to manually pop in and edit the history of a status incident (or if there is, I haven’t found it).
   
   All of this, combined with #2 makes the status indicators feel VERY finicky and “not ready for prime time”.
   
   Do you have any suggestions on how to better manage these statuses?

Those are all fairly detailed/specific - so for a bonus question:

5. I assume that it’s possible (and even intended) that we can use automations within Freshservice to (for example) have FreshPing alert to something going down, use Alert Rules to create a ticket, and (potentially) have that ticket automate creating a Status Incident to alert stakeholders who may be subscribed to status updates for the impacted service(s)?

Thanks!

Is there a way we can use it to where we manually change statuses and titles of the the item we are tracking? In other words, does syncing in services make it to where they can only be synced and not added manually?

Hey @dmcmaster thanks for your feedback!

The ability to import requesters and requester groups as status page subscribers is on our roadmap.

We have recently launched single sign-on for status page. It enables everyone in your organization to access a private status page even if they are not a subscriber. If your primary use case for this request was to provide access to requesters, that should be taken care of by the SSO feature.

Let me know if that works for you. 

Hello @chanley, looking forward to interacting with you!

We are rolling out better look and feel customization for status pages this month. Keep an eye out for the release notes. I would like to know more about the fields that you wish to be displayed with services.

One can customize the content and look-and-feel of status page emails that are sent to subscribers from the Admin > Email Notifications > Status page section.

We are also working on a few more email customization features and I would be happy to know your thoughts and suggestions. You could post here or we could connect offline as well.

What is the link to join?

For those who aren’t able to join - please try this link -

 https://freshworks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_pbn1caV0Tve_tJ2JHq5eTQ

@SteelFrost @DJL 

Hello everyone!

Thank you for your participation today. We hope you found the session helpful. Unfortunately, we couldn't accommodate additional questions due to time limitations. Please feel free to post your questions here and tag @a5huto5h ! He will be sure to help you out!

@Anusha will share the session recording here soon!

Hey @john.gaytan 

Sorry that you couldn’t attend the session. But, you can access the recording soon as we post it here.