As we step into the year 2024, advancements in artificial intelligence have led us to the era of near fully self-driving cars, marking a significant milestone in how technology can transform daily life. This progress beckons a parallel evolution in IT Service Desks: the time is ripe for automation to play a crucial role in detecting and remedying issues in end-user devices.
Enter Riverbed Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk—a game-changer designed to propel your IT Service Desk into a new world of:
- Significantly Reduced IT Costs
- Lower Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
- Enhanced IT Productivity
- Streamlined Automated Remediation
The cornerstone of Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk is its ability to trigger low-code runbooks upon any alert. These runbooks, with their drag-and-drop interface, allow for the definition of troubleshooting logic through nodes packed with pre-built code, enabling you to:
- Navigate complex decision paths effortlessly.
- Make external calls for swift remediation actions.
- Retrieve third-party data seamlessly.
Let’s delve into a couple of real examples which showcase what this new capability can help your teams achieve.
Remedy low disk space
As trivial as it sounds, running low on disk space can be quite debilitating and drastically affect end-user productivity, comparable to the frustration of slow boot times. In the runbook shown below, each of the colorful nodes contain pre-defined code for various functions such as making external API calls, decision logic, visualization and more—and it works like a flow chart.
Once an alert triggers this runbook, execution starts. Next it does the obvious: promptly identifies potential space savings by clearing the usual suspects like temporary files and emptying the recycle bin. If that gives back substantial free space, then the lower path from the decision branch executes the remediation logic through a web call and displays the result as part of the runbook output. Conversely, if the initial cleanup does not free enough space and manual investigation is needed, the runbook calls an API to list the top few files and folders by size from the device (via the Aternity REST API), automatically generates a ServiceNow incident, and provides the top files and folders by size in the incident description. That way, when the technician looks at it, the next steps become obvious.
Resolve application startup problems
Consider the case with CAD applications, where large files frequently move between the user’s device and a SaaS back-end, posing unique challenges. Here is an example from an actual scenario faced by one of our customers experiencing frequent a flood of issues with the CAD native Windows application hanging and abruptly crashing.
This runbook springs into action upon detecting an application crash event in the user’s Windows event log. Upon executing, the runbook first tries to look for file timeouts (obtained via call to Aternity API). If it sees timeouts, it runs a traceroute to typical destinations for the SaaS backend hosts and conducts a speed test to check whether the user’s bandwidth could be a culprit.
With conclusive evidence of timeouts, the runbook compiles the results from traceroute, speed test, and file timeouts into a ServiceNow incident for further action. If no timeouts are detected, the runbook can send a notification to the user (similar to below) to ask their permission to automatically open a ticket on their behalf.
Empower your IT Service Desk
Gone are the days of manual troubleshooting, triaging, and remedying every service desk ticket. With the power of Riverbed Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk, innovative low-code runbooks take on the tedious work of triage and troubleshooting, delivering insightful results. To explore more about how the Intelligent Service Desk can transform your IT operations, please visit our website.