6 Time-Consuming ITSM Tasks you should AUTOMATE today! | IT Support Teams

Quite often, IT automation is feared with the notion that it’s complex, requires resources and large investments.The solution is simply to start small – gain quick wins in automating repetitive tasks, before expanding automation into more complex processes.

What can you easily automate to free up resources and launch new IT process automation projects?

1) Incident Escalation Process

It’s 8 am and Service Desk is flooded with end-user calls. Outlook and Skype is down and everyone from the CIO to an intern is calling SD to report a problem.

The automated alternative: You should have an automated process that includes the following steps:

• A monitoring system which automatically captures and alerts L1 when there is increase in call/ticket volume from a specific region.
• Notifies L1 to identify the issue severity & priority and gathers all data points.
• A quick call between L1, Incident Manager & L2/L3.
• Close loop, update ticket, and notify relevant personnel about status and closure of that incident

“When you don’t have an escalation process in place, minor incidents can turn into a major outage and a long nightmare! “

2) Password Resets/Unlock Accounts/Change Passwords

How much time does your IT team spend on Active Directory password resets and locked accounts? This can sum-up to tens of hours on a weekly basis, depending on the company size and number of user requests. In some cases, IT support personnel handle password reset calls for almost 40% of their working day. The procedure for each call includes phone authentication, execution of reset, confirmation, and documenting the call closure.

Automating password reset alone can drop Service Desk queries by more than 40%.

The automated alternative: An automated workflow that handles the entire process. Users initiate the resolution through a self-service portal. The workflow then reset the password or unlocks the account and sends it back to users. Optionally, it may first request a staff confirmation via SMS.

The results of such process reduce support calls and reduce end- user downtime. Admins can view and control user actions, and have more time to focus on more valuable tasks.

"According to the Burton Group, password management can cost $250 per user, per year."

3) Free up Server Disk Space

One of the most frequent causes of unscheduled downtime for applications is a critical disk space shortfalls. In fact, insufficient disk space on one of your SQL Servers, IIS applications, or Exchange can be more disruptive than any other system or network failure.

A simple issue, such as fast-growing log files that consume disk space, can cause a server to crash. If such a simple task is neglected, it can lead to an expensive downtime and hours of lost work. Monitoring and proactively maintaining your servers with disk clean-up jobs is a repetitive, time-consuming task. You can make it easy for you by just automating it as you wish.

The automated alternative: An automated workflow that:

?      Monitors servers for low disk space

?      Archives, deletes or moves any logs or temp files to a different location

?      Sends notifications about disk space

?      Can be scheduled to run on regular basis, or to be initiated based on a trigger

4) Shutdown Remote Computers

Regardless whether ‘going green’ is a social trend or not, you  can take simple actions to significantly reduce energy consumption and cut IT operational costs. Ford, the US-base car manufacturer, estimated that 60 percent of its global employees did not shutdown their computers at the end of a working day. Doing so, according to Ford, would save 16,000-25,000 metric tones of carbon dioxide a year and $1.2M in energy costs.

The automated energy saving alternative: A workflow that turns to standby mode all network-connected idle computers or servers, based on rules and policies.

The switch to standby mode is preferred to a forced shutdown, as it eliminates complications and the need for long wait for boot up each morning.

“We are saving over $2000 per day with a simple automated workflow that switches all our PCs to standby mode.” - Jeff Bowman, Dell

5) Monitor Windows Event Logs

You are probably aware of the fact that at least 70% of security events that cause enterprises losses involve inside users. The Windows system generates log data throughout its operation, so that if there's a problem with your Windows system, it is probably listed in the Event Log.

The problem is that manually tracking issues across all Windows event logs can take time to find and troubleshoot. Monitoring event logs can alert you on security threats, system or app failure, create audit reports that saves you a lot of time finding historical information

The automated alternative: An automated process that parses the Windows event logs (application, security, system etc…) and alerts about critical events of mission-critical applications like Exchange, IIS, MS-SQL.

The process will trigger an alert to notify the relevant person who can instantly respond to the event and take action with no delays. The process will also document every step in the workflow for future investigation and statistical reports. This process doesn’t have to be executed using any agent install on your machine, simply allow WMI on your remote server.

6) Monitor Files and Folders

Change may be a good thing for the world, but not necessarily for the Sys admins. How many times you had some issues with users deleting or changing files then claiming they never touched them? If you have users trying to blame you for their system errors due to file changes you should start monitoring them now!

You need to have monitoring on your mission critical app’ files and folders, for any change or to check data integrity. But this is not the only reason why you should do that! a hint - IT security and Compliance.

The automated alternative: A pre-defined set of workflows that automate daily routine tasks on your mission-critical files and folders:

• Monitor changes, file deletion, file size, last modified
• File parsing and data integrity
• Handle any change or errors with automated alerts notifications and remediation tasks as needed.
• Delete, Move, Archive, Compress files etc… to maintain system availability

Credits: Ayehu.com | #servicedesk #automation #servicemanagement #innovation #digitaltransformation