Note: All the features/enhancements below will be available on Starter and Growth plans on Jan 18th 2024. For Pro and Enterprise plans will be available on Jan 29th 2024.
Product version: 2024.R01L.01
New Features and Enhancements
Dark Theme
Category: IT Service Management
Agents can now opt for the dark theme to reduce eye strain and improve focus. Easily toggle between dark and light themes or set a preferred theme in the Profile icon menu. Dark theme is accessible on both the agent web portal and mobile app.
More details here.
Note: The beta is now available to all users since December 22, 2023. Ensure the mobile app is updated to the latest version for accessing dark theme.
Enhanced Change Impact Analysis
Category: IT Service Management
The impacted services for a change now evaluates five levels of asset dependencies for a more thorough analysis, mitigating risks associated with changes.
Added Service Request Details
Category: IT Service Management
The Activities tab now captures ‘Requested for' details when a service request is raised for someone else, enhancing detail and visibility.
Gain actionable insights with a summary
Category: IT Service Management
Freddy Insights now supports a summary of tickets related to the trending employee issues. With this, you can quickly understand more details about a commonly occurring issue for your employees and take action accordingly.
Note: This will be available starting January 31st, 2024.
Enhanced Approval URL Logic
Category: IT Service Management
Portal-specific approval URLs now accurately reflect the associated company in MSP mode, while approval URLs will return the agent portal URL, ensuring precise navigation for portal-specific and general approvals.
Resolution note generator
Category: IT Service Management
Agents can now create resolution notes for each ticket to aid quick references and faster service delivery. For customers with the Freddy copilot addon, this includes an AI-powered resolution note generator encompassing the root cause, actions taken, and resolution.
More details here.
Note: This feature will be available only from 31st January 2024 for all users.
Larger reporting canvas in Freshservice Analytics
Category: IT Service Management
Users will now be able to accommodate and view more widgets on each report page. The Freshservice Analytics Unified Report Builder is getting upgraded to a 36x36 grid layout which is a 3X increase as compared to its current size.
Reports can now be made even more comprehensive as more widgets can be accommodated on a single page, thus reducing toggling between pages.
Note: Existing reports and widgets inside them will auto-adjust to the new size based on their current dimension without requiring any user intervention.
User Events for Serverless Apps
Category: IT Service Management
Developers can now subscribe to and respond to user-related events in Serverless Apps: Agent/Requester Creation, Agent/Requester Update, and Agent/Requester Deletion.
More details here.
New Improved Audit Logs in Freshservice
Category: IT Service Management
Users can now find audit logs for the below additional scenarios:
- When requestors are added or removed from a requestor group
- When agents or requestors account access is blocked or unblocked
- When an agent or requester is associated or disassociated with a department from the ‘Departments’ settings page.
Note: For an MSP account, ‘Requester’ is called ‘Contact’ and ‘Requester Group’ is called ‘Contact Group’.
Status Page now generally available with major enhancements
Category: IT Operations Management
Trial customers will now be able to access the Status Page which is now generally available to all Pro & Enterprise customers. The Status Page enables users to update customers and other end-users by displaying the status of their services from within Freshservice. Its general availability comes with two significant enhancements:
- Scheduled Maintenance: Users will now be able to intimate their end-users in advance about scheduled maintenance, reducing frustration and surprise when the service is temporarily unavailable. This enhancement will help set clear expectations about when the maintenance will occur, how long it is expected to last, and what services or features will be affected. By proactively informing end-users about an upcoming maintenance window, users will be able to gain their trust and confidence while projecting a reliable brand image.
- Incident creation revamped: Users can now benefit from better user experience while creating an incident in their Status Page. Enhancements include:
- Rich preview of status page in the side panel
- Support for canned responses for quicker, more standardized updates
- Published incidents have a uniqueStatus Page Incident ID
- Contextually richer UI
Alerts now available in global search
Category: IT Operations Management
Agents will now be able to search for alerts based on specific keywords in the alert content. They will also be able to filter the search results based on the same parameters. When a user starts typing the keyword in the global search, the tool will display matching alerts in the results. Plus, they will see the top 3 matches based on relevance in the search results in a section dedicated to alerts.
Note: A user will be able to view alerts search results only if they have at least view permission for Alert Management for that workspace.
Prometheus now available as an OOTB integration
Category: IT Operations Management
Users can now ingest alerts from Prometheus, a powerful open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit, into Freshservice using the new out of the box integration. With this enhancement, users will be able to consolidate alerts within Freshservice, benefit from noise reduction, conditional conversion to incidents, and automatic routing to agent groups, helping reduce the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).
More details here.
Asset Auditing Enhancements
Category - IT Asset Management
Introducing new asset auditing capabilities to empower efficient asset management.
- Enhanced Asset Tracking
Admins can now track assets created and updated by specific users or sources with the addition of new asset fields. - Created by and Last updated by (Source) - Specifies a source that created or last updated an asset. Some of the sources include Discovery Agent, Discovery Probe, SCCM Probe, Jamf, Chrome Connector, Cloud Discovery apps, and Workflows.
Note: SCCM Probe is now introduced as a new source for asset creation and updation. - Created by and Last Updated by ( User ) - Specifies the user that created or last updated an asset.
- Granular Activity Logs
Capture precise activity logs at a granular level to track sources for asset creation and updates. - Discovery Agent, Probe, Intune, Autmox, Jamf, Device42, Chrome Connector, Cloud discovery apps etc, will be tracked as separate sources in activities instead of System as a default asset source.
- Updates from integrated apps like Intune, Automox, Airwatch via API key will now specify the accurate source, instead of being classified as user-based updates in the activity logs.
- Execution of workflows and specific actions on an asset will now be systematically tracked in the activities log.
- Comprehensive Asset Export
Export all new asset fields introduced, including Usage Type, Created at, and Last updated by for auditing purposes. - Improved Reporting and Filtering
Utilize the newly introduced fields seamlessly in reporting, filters, and group by functionalities to gauge your asset management processes. - Source-Specific Asset Automation
Tailor workflows to perform actions automatically when assets are created or updated from designated sources such as Discovery Agent, Probe, Intune, Automox, Jamf, Device42, Chrome Connector, and Cloud discovery apps. - API Enhancement
Admins can now access these new additional read-only asset fields, Created by and Last updated by (Source), Created by and Last Updated by ( User ) in the API responses for more robust integration with external systems.
Quick access to view cloud assets
Category: IT Asset Management
The Cloud Inventory page empowers users with a comprehensive view of their discovered cloud assets, accessible with just a single click. With the improved cloud inventory page now mirroring asset management features of the inventory page, users can effortlessly:
- View and manage cloud assets better.
- Create and save customized cloud asset views for quick access to a filtered set of assets.
- Access and explore curated reports for deeper insights into cloud assets.
Workflow Execution log enhancements
Category - Automation
Admins can now troubleshoot workflow issues faster by using the search feature and the workflow ID ( unique identifier) in the execution logs.
Optimize Project Lifecycle with Agile Metrics
Category: Project Management
Users will now be able to easily optimize project lifecycle end to end. With critical agile metrics like cycle time, lead time (to name a few) available in Project Analytics, organizations will be able to identify bottlenecks, increase project and team productivity and take informed corrective decisions.
More details here.
Note: Agile metrics in Project Analytics will be available by Jan 31, 2024.
Automatic Document Generation
Category: Freshservice for Business Teams
Admins can choose to enable document templates to be auto-sent to the requester without approval for an employee if all merged fields are present.
This is possible now with a toggle, ‘Automatically send documents to the requester’ that can be enabled right when the admin creates a Service Catalog item with a document template.
Attachment type field in Onboarding form
Category: Freshservice for Business Teams
Admins can now add a file attachment field in the employee onboarding forms. This allows easy uploading of documents from the involved stakeholders such as the reporting manager, hiring manager, newly hired employee, etc during the onboarding process.
Authorization for Virtual Agent providing PDF documents directly in Slack
Category: Freshservice for Business Teams
Agents can now share PDF documents directly in Slack chats by granting the relevant authorization within Slack. This authorization allows virtual agents the necessary permission to securely share PDF documents within Slack. This streamlines the delivery of document-related service requests directly within Slack workspace.
Mobile On-Call Management
Category: Mobile
Agents can now conveniently access their on-call shifts by tapping the profile or More icon, ensuring ease of use and the ability to view schedules on the go.
Note: This enhancement will be available before the end of January 2024 and requires app updation.
Important updates
Reminders for upcoming upgrades and deprecations
More details here
Bug Fixes
These were the product defects detected, and they have now been fixed.
- In the Dark theme, the text with hard-coded black color or specific color formatting was not readable with the black background. Also, the black background was reported to be too dark. Both the issues have been addressed.
- iOS mobile app- There was an error on the ‘Approval Detail’ screen when the Approval was initiated by a workflow.
- Android mobile app- Push Notification not shown for non-primary workspace actions.
- Text fields for assets with date values were parsed into date formats in the Asset Activity log.
- Improved the efficiency when exporting a large number of assets by reducing the processing time.
- “Feature is no longer accessible” error was shown to some agents when they tried to add/ edit dashboards that were shared with all the agents in the account.
- Business agents were shown in the agent dropdown of IT workspaces even though business agents cannot be assigned tickets in IT workspaces.
- When a service item dependent field was used in a custom object, any change to the dependent field was affecting the custom object field. This is fixed now by enhancing the dependent field for service items.
- An error was being thrown when a child service item that has a mandatory field wasn’t used while creating a service request for parent service request.
