And a few seemingly simple tweaks/additions would make our lives so much easier.
A useful (critical) feature of our previous ticketing system Autotask was the ability for things to just happen automatically with tickets if programmed to do so, in real-time. The closest thing we have with Syncro is ticket automations, which run once per hour. The frequency is not configurable, nor can it be set to more of a traditional “ever (#) (interval)” recurring schedule.
There’s plenty of info in the Ticket Automations help article to go toward defining/taming expectations on this feature, but this is becoming an increasingly painful realization since moving to Syncro that we will have to have humans again covering duties that were formerly automated. If we as a ~10 technician MSP are feeling this this much, I can only imagine what larger MSPs must be grappling with.
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When attempting to implement automatic assignment of tickets for a certain customer of ours, High/Critical tickets have gone too long sitting idle before the system assigns them out to the technician. This hurt us today with a customer that we’re trying to impress.
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“Customer” is not an option in ticket automation conditions. I worked around this by creating a custom contract & SLA - neither of which will be used for anything outside of this automation, since we don’t use either of those features - and use the ‘SLA’ condition once it was set as a SLA for the customer. The problem is- SLA is now a visible field across all tickets in our system and the name of the SLA is visible to all customer-only techs across all our customers with whom we share Syncro access. It’s just messy and unnecessary when all we need to do is limit the criteria of an automation to be for one customer.
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In line with #2, we simply need more criteria available for automations. In a perfect world, if a ticket were say, containing a certain custom field (we use custom fields for ticket categorizations and various tags for reporting purposes), those could be criteria in automation, too.
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We could be doing so much more with automation of tickets if they happened closer to real-time, but even every 10-15 minutes would be adequate and we could dial back our aspirations and be happy. As of right now, things we were hoping to offload to Syncro such as simple ticket assignment are having to be done by a set of eyes as was the case before we had Autotask doing it… because of the few urgent issues that will fall through the cracks.
What’s been worrisome is that because some of these feel like such common-sense features to be missing, we’ve wondered if this is simply a choice to reduce overall load on the servers/network that will not be altered in the future. We can respect when the innerworkings call for limitations like that if it is a literal matter of the platform working versus not working, but would GREATLY wish for the above limitations to be reconsidered/revisited by Syncro if at all possible, as soon as possible, as a point of potential growth for Syncro. If faster, more elaborate ticket automations / “Ticketing Plus” has to be a paid/premium additional feature to justify additional load, we’d have already blindly bought it before we started our migration. It’s that important. We’re trying to do perhaps a dozen or so rules at most, and they used to happen in real-time but would be more or less acceptable at 15-minute intervals.