Tickets that know their machine
Wegweiser now reads the tickets in your Zammad, works out which machine each one is about, and says which are worth an investigation. A case started from a ticket reports back into that ticket. And a new help button on managed machines files a request that already knows its machine and what the machine was doing at the moment somebody asked.
A helpdesk knows who wrote a ticket. It does not know which computer the ticket is about, and that is the first thing a technician has to find out before anything else can happen: ring the user back, ask for the name on the sticker, guess from the email address. Wegweiser knows the machines. Today the two meet.
Your tickets, by machine
Under Tickets (in the sidebar, and on each device page), Wegweiser lists the tickets from the Zammad groups you choose, every five minutes, and says which machine each one is about and how it knows. A ticket raised from the machine itself, or one Wegweiser filed about a machine, is bound to it. So is a ticket from somebody who always asks for help from the same computer, or whose sign-in name is their email address.
What Wegweiser is only guessing at, it says so. A ticket that names one of the client's computers, or comes from somebody whose sign-in name looks like theirs, gets a suggestion: one click to confirm it, or pick another. Nothing acts on a suggestion until somebody does, because an investigation sent to the wrong machine is worse than none.
The conversation stays in Zammad. Wegweiser keeps what the list needs and reads the thread live when you open a ticket.
A first read of every ticket
Every new ticket from one of your clients is read once, on the AI provider you have configured, and gets a verdict: worth an investigation or not, and why. "The printer is out of toner" is not a case. "Outlook freezes every time I open a PDF, since the updates last night" is.
For a ticket about a known machine, that read goes into the ticket as an internal note your technicians see and your client does not: the machine's health, its weakest checks in a line each, and what it all has to do with this ticket. On our own desk this afternoon, a freeze report about a Linux workstation came back pointing at a graphics driver mismatch the machine was still logging, and said to check that first.
You choose what happens next under Tickets > Settings:
- Offer (the default): the ticket is marked worth a case, and a technician opens it with one click, the brief already written.
- Automatic: the case opens by itself, within a daily limit you set.
- Off: tickets are listed and matched to machines, and nothing is read.
A machine that already has a case running gets that case, never a second one. Reading a ticket costs one wegcoin on our provider and nothing on your own key.
Cases report back into the ticket
A case opened from a ticket attaches to it. No second ticket is filed, nothing is written that your client can read, and the case's findings arrive in the ticket as an internal note. The ticket stays in whatever state your technician left it in: closing it is theirs.
The help button
Agent 0.3.108 adds a Wegweiser icon to the notification area of every signed-in session on a Windows machine, once you switch it on for a client. The person at the machine clicks it and a short form opens in their own browser, in your name, in your language: what is wrong, a screenshot if they have one, and send.
The request already knows which computer it came from, from the agent itself and not from anything the person typed. It is filed in your Zammad for the person who raised it, so replies go to them. And the moment they clicked, the agent took ten seconds of the machine's own measurements: how busy the processor, memory and network were, and which programs were doing it. "It is slow right now" used to be the ticket nobody could reproduce. Now it arrives with right now attached.
The icon does nothing until it is clicked, which matters on a terminal server with fifty people signed in. It runs as the person, never with the agent's own rights. Switch it off and it disappears from every desktop within a minute. With no helpdesk connected, requests land under Tickets and your masters get an email.
Who asked for help from which machine is kept for twelve months and then deleted, and it is never shown on the machine itself: on a shared PC that would tell the next person who sat there before them. The form says, in plain words, what the machine measured and that nothing else was taken.
The update reaches our own machines first and yours a day later, as every
agent update does. On macOS and Linux, wegweiser-agent get-help does the
same from a shortcut until those platforms get their own icon.
Who sees tickets
A ticket belongs to a client, and anybody who can see that client can see its tickets. On the settings page you can switch tickets off for a person, and decide who else may open cases, since a case spends wegcoins. A case opened by somebody who is not a master reads the machine's stored history; live reads stay with masters.
Also in this release
The agent's process inventory now walks the process list once instead of twice, and looks up each account's name once instead of once per process. On a busy terminal server that was thousands of lookups every time, often to a domain controller, for a few dozen people.