Status services for teams

Enterprise feature (new in 1.19.2, helpdesk). See the Helpdesk overview.

The Status page already tracks the services your organisation relies on: vendors’ own status feeds, and internal services you declare incidents on. Status services bring that into the desk, team by team. Not every service matters to every team: IT follows the VPN and Microsoft 365, Facilities follows the door entry system. While they are signed in to the desk, agents see their teams’ services in the top bar, get a pop-up when one has trouble, and can declare a major incident from it.

How it relates to the Status page

• The Status page is unchanged, in every edition. Services are still added and removed there (Manage monitored systems, Administrators), and its incidents are declared there (Manage incidents, Approvers and Administrators). The desk only reads the services and their states.
• The desk needs the Status page’s own read permission. Every status feature in the desk, and every notice about it, needs Read status board (status.read) as well as a desk role. Every built-in role (Viewer and up) holds it, so this only matters for custom roles without it: their people see no services, pop-ups, banners or asks.
• The desk never writes to the Status page. Declaring a major incident from a service records the service on the incident, for the recovery ask below. Posting the incident’s updates to the Status page is a separate choice on the incident, which needs Manage incidents (see On the Status page).

Choosing a team’s services

Desk settings → Teams (Manage teams): open Status services for IT on the team’s card. It lists every service on the Status page with its state Now:

• tick each service the team follows, and
• choose its Pop-up for: Outage and degraded (the default), Outage only, or Off (banner only).

Then Save. A service that isn’t on the list yet is added on the Status page.

Team leads (Manage people in their teams) choose for the teams they lead from the desk’s top bar: open the status popover and choose Choose services for IT. It opens the same list in a Status services dialog.

The status pill

The desk’s top bar shows the services your teams follow:

• while any of them is degraded or down, a coloured pill says how many: “2 services affected” (red when one is down);
• otherwise a status icon (Service status) with a green dot.

Click it for Services for IT, HR: each service with its state and the vendor’s or the incident’s description, when the services were last checked (“From the Status page · checked 2 minutes ago”), and a Status page link. At the foot, Choose services in Desk settings → Teams (for people who manage teams), Choose services for IT (for its lead), or “Your team lead chooses these services.”

You see only your own teams’ services. The pill doesn’t show while your teams follow none and you can’t choose any.

Pop-ups

When a service one of your teams follows degrades or goes down, the desk shows a pop-up in the lower right:

VPN is down Gateway unreachable. Started 10:14, 3 new tickets mention vpn since.

• Declare major incident opens the declare dialog, prefilled (see below). It shows only to people who can run major incidents in that team. While a major incident is already open for the service, the pop-up links to it instead (Major incident #1101), so nobody declares a second one.
• View details opens the status popover.
• Dismiss (the cross) hides it, and it stays hidden.

Each person gets one pop-up per spell of trouble. Trouble that comes back within 10 minutes of recovering counts as the same spell, so a flapping feed doesn’t keep interrupting. A team set to Outage only gets its pop-up when the service goes from degraded to down.

When the service is back, people who saw the pop-up get a short note (“VPN is operational again. Back to normal at 11:02, after it started at 10:14.”), shown for up to 12 hours. Planned maintenance counts as recovered. A service whose state is Unknown (its feed never answered) keeps the spell open.

A team set to Off (banner only) gets no pop-up and no notification: only the queue banner.

The desk notification

Desk settings → Notifications has a new event, A service your team uses is down: bell and push on by default, no email. You are told once per spell, and again when the service is back.

It replaces the workspace’s own Service status notification for you: an agent the desk tells about a service doesn’t also get the Status page’s bell for it.

The queue banner

While a service a team follows has trouble, that team’s queue shows a banner: “VPN is down since 10:14”, with the description. It shows to anyone who can see that queue, whatever the team’s pop-up level, with:

• Declare major incident (or Major incident #1101 when one is open for the service), and
• Hide for today, which hides it for you until the end of your day (at most 24 hours).

Declaring from a service

Declare major incident on a pop-up or a banner opens the declare dialog, started from the Status page (“Started from the Status page: VPN is down.”), with:

• the title (“VPN is down”) and the team filled in;
• Link new tickets automatically while it’s open filled with words from the service’s name, each three letters or more (“HR Portal” gives portal; well-known services get the words people use, such as mail, email and outlook for Microsoft 365);
• Link the 3 open tickets that mention vpn since 10:14: the team’s open tickets since the trouble started;
• Solve the incident’s tickets when VPN is operational again (asks first).

The recovery ask

With that last box ticked, nothing is solved automatically. When the service is operational again (or in maintenance), the people who can run the incident are asked: the person who declared it and its ticket’s assignee, or, if neither can, the team’s people who can. They get a bell and push, and a card in the desk:

VPN is operational again Major incident #1101 VPN is down from home is still open with 34 linked tickets. Solve it now?

Solve incident and linked tickets solves it as Solve all would. Not now dismisses the card for you. If the service had already recovered when the incident was declared, they are asked straight away.

Timing

The pill, pop-ups and banners update within about a minute while the desk is open. Vendor feeds are still checked every five minutes, so a vendor’s outage reaches the desk when the Status page next sees it.

Housekeeping

Each spell of trouble is kept while it lasts, and deleted 90 days after it ended. Dismissing a pop-up, Hide for today and Not now change only what you see, so they aren’t in the audit log.

In the audit log

Action	Shown as
helpdesk.team_status.services_changed	Changed a team’s status services
helpdesk.team_status.incident_watched	Linked a major incident to a status service
helpdesk.team_status.solve_asked	Asked to solve a major incident after its service recovered (by the system)