Service Level Management in NetSupport ServiceDesk.

Service Level Management (SLM) is one of the core (and probably most important) components of the ITIL Service Delivery framework. If a healthy relationship between the customer and IT team is to be maintained, it very much relies on the ability of the ServiceDesk to deliver efficient and cost-effective services within agreed timescales.

SLM formalises the approach by which services are defined and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) developed between customer and vendor.

Executing Service Level Management enables IT staff to more accurately and cost-effectively provision identified levels of service to the business, ensuring business units and IT teams understand their roles and responsibilities.

How NetSupport ServiceDesk supports Service Level Management:

NetSupport ServiceDesk’s in-built automated workflow processes are at the core of the product’s ability to help IT teams manage support desk efficiency. These processes also come to the fore when tracking performance against formal SLAs that have been agreed between the customer and service provider.

NetSupport ServiceDesk’s SLA option gives you the ability to:

• Establish condition-based workflow rules for incidents, problems and change requests that are continually checked against stored SLAs.
• Give instant visibility to imminent service bottlenecks to ensure relevant items can be actioned before impacting on service performance.
• Gather historical and real-time data on service performance.
• Tracking and reporting service performance against SLAs on an ongoing basis.

NetSupport ServiceDesk supports the incident management process.

Although Incident Management by definition is a reactive task, the inbuilt workflow processes within NetSupport ServiceDesk make it a very proactive tool, making it easy for your customers and service desk operators to log, track and manage incidents in such a way that resolution times are kept to a minimum resulting in less downtime of critical systems.
The added advantage of NetSupport ServiceDesk is that it helps you quickly identify recurring issues or trends in the type of incident being logged. Multiple incidents can be linked and, if needed, assigned to one of the other ITIL processes such as Problem or Change Management, ensuring your first-line operators aren’t duplicating their efforts, as well as enabling investigation of the underlying problem to be left to the appropriate specialist.

NetSupport ServiceDesk helps the Incident Management process by providing:

• Customer logging of incidents online and the ability to review current status in real time.
• Automated Incoming/Outgoing email processing.
• Automatic assignment of incidents to operators based on pre-defined customer rules for either Problem Type or User Type.
• Automatic escalation of incidents based on customer-specific rules.
• Plus much more.

The benefits of flexible reporting

NetSupport ServiceDesk provides an on-screen dashboard providing realtime statistical data enabling instant analysis of Incident, Problem and Change Request status.
In addition to the selection pre-defined reports, NetSupport ServiceDesk allows you to create and save your own custom reports. The simple drag and drop interface enables you to build a fully customised report including HTML, text and supporting graphs.

Dashboard
The ServiceDesk Dashboard provides Operators with on-line up-to-theminute status reports. Pre-defined categories are supplied and you
simply choose the appropriate items to include. Multiple categories can be selected simultaneously and the on-screen results are refreshed at intervals to suit your requirements.

Explore Reports
NetSupport ServiceDesk provides a number of pre-defined management reports. The built-in reports should cover most requirements, but users can create their own custom reports using the Custom Report Designer if needed. By default, all users with permissions to read reports can open any of the reports listed. If you need to restrict access to certain report folders, you can set the permissions for a folder.

Report Folder Permissions
If you need to restrict access to certain report folders, this can be done by changing the permissions on the report folder. By default, the
Everyone group has permissions to all folders. To secure a folder, you must add a company, department or user to the folder permissions and remove the Everyone group.

Custom Report Designer
As well as providing you with a selection pre-defined reports, NetSupport ServiceDesk allows you to create and save your own custom reports. The simple drag and drop interface enables you to build a fully customised report including HTML, text and supporting graphs.