Beginner’s boost: open office hours

Liri: So Sarah and I will go over your questions and show the flows over the platform itself. Before we begin, I do want to say that this webinar is part of different resources and trainings that you can do yourself. We have our KB Center with lots of articles explaining all the different flows within Atera. We have a great blog walking you through the IT world, everything that is interesting, everything that is going on, to hear about the different aspects of the field day-to-day. We have different webinars, so this webinar is a little different because it’s more of a workshop where you ask the questions, but we also have more in-depth webinars on different subjects and webinars with different partners that we host. There is a new Atera community where you can meet each other and really see how different people do different things in the platform or in the industry in general. Last but not least, we have our support team available for you 24/7 via chat or support at Atera. 

The way that the session is going to be held is you have a Q&A tab to your right, and you’re more than welcome to put any questions that you have. We’ll be happy to take those and share the screen to show you the flow in the platform itself. This way, we can all learn from your questions. We’ll try to go one step backward from the question and one step forward to give you a full flow of some part of the platform itself. So please fill in all the questions in the Q&A section. Feel free; this is what we’re here for. Now, I will share my screen to introduce you to the Atera platform. 

Welcome. This is the Atera page, and I will put my Q&A section here at the side. I see there are still no questions, so I’ll just briefly go over the platform until you guys submit your questions. This is the dashboard, the main dashboard, our new advanced dashboard where you can resize, refactor all the different tiles that we have here. You can remove them, you can add them, make them larger if this one is more interesting, move them around, and it also redirects you to the relevant part within the platform. The toolbar here at the top, as I mentioned before, has a question mark to reach out to our support or help center. If we’re already talking about that, the Atera community or the features board to ask for any features that you want to see in the platform in the future. Atera is still evolving and adding features all the time, and we would love to hear your feedback. 

As always, while I do the speech, questions are starting to come up. So I’ll start with the first question. Can you all see the question on the screen? Yes, I tried using the software patching via your automation profile. Which software is patched? Only those installed by Atera as a bundle? This is a great question. Let’s explain a little bit of the background of this question. So the devices that we have, we have a list of devices, and there are different actions that we can do to them. We can also have the software inventory for those devices. But you can also use what we call an IT automation profile. With those IT automation profiles, you can schedule them to run automatically. They will run different tasks from your operating system patch management to your software patch management, installation, and different maintenance tasks. The specific question was about the software that is being patched. Will it be only for the software that was downloaded through Atera from the software bundles? You can download the software here, which is a great one, but then you can also patch them. When we’re talking about patching those software, you’ll hover here, and you’ll see the question mark. A lot of places in the platform will redirect you to different articles explaining a little bit about the place that you’re at. This is another great thing that is hiding here, that says the different software that are going to be updated regardless if you downloaded it from Atera in the bundle or not. This is an important and great thing to remember. We’re taking care of different software that you already have. 

Let’s go over to the next question. How can I use the new ticket assistant in the best way? Thank you so much for that question. One step backward from this question, the ticket assistant. We have a new friend in your ticket tab here, which is our new AI assistant. By the way, we are looking for a name for the AI assistant, so if you have any ideas, we are willing to hear them. It’s a great time for new names. Basically, this little guy here will help you figure out what’s going on with the ticket when you hover over the ticket or from within the ticket itself. It depends if you’re working on the ticket or you’re just the manager that goes over the different tickets that are in the queue. The AI assistant will summarize all the communication up until the current stage. You can have it as a paragraph, some bullets, whatever works for you. After it does that, it will try to generate a solution. It will look at what has happened, the different steps that were already taken, and it will try to generate a solution for the current stage. If a script is relevant here, it will also try to generate a script. You can also generate a reply to help you think of the first thing that you would like to tell the customer when you see that. I’ll briefly remind you about the ticketing page. If you link between the contact and the agent itself, this is where we can actually get the best out of Atera. We can read the information of the agent that is linked to the ticket, so we can have a holistic view of what’s going on, not just on a superficial level of what’s the issue, but also getting the metrics from the device itself. 

Sarah: Yes, I actually want to interrupt. Sorry for those watching. Yes, we’re going to be back and forth, doing different things. While we’re talking about the AI and the ticket assistant, I would love to show you guys the customer portal because we have a specific AI assistant in there that I want to show you guys. So if I can share my screen. Can you just confirm, Liri, that you’re seeing? 

Liri: Yes, we can. 

Sarah: Awesome. As Liri said, we have the AI assistant in the ticket itself. Once the ticket’s in, the AI assistant can just summarize the ticket, help generate solutions, etc. What it looks like on the other side is we have an AI assistant available in the service portal or the customer portal. Basically, what that means is when your end users are coming to the portal, they can be assisted by AI, and then only problems that need more help will go through. Let’s say, “Hi there, how can I help you?” I will say, “I can’t remember my password.” The AI is going to respond with a solution. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re having trouble remembering your password. I recommend trying to reset your password through the system’s password recovery options. If you still have issues, please contact your IT administrator for further assistance.” I did choose something very simple, and it’s telling me to just go and reset the password through the system. But you can say other things, and it will again generate other solutions. Let’s say, “My printer isn’t responding.” Let’s see how it takes that. I guess I also should have said thank you. Always thank the AI, Sarah. Always thank the AI. “I’m sorry to hear that your printer isn’t responding. I can help you troubleshoot the issue.” Then I can directly from here click “Clear Printer Queue,” and it will say, “Are you sure?” I’ll say yes, and then it will ask for me to verify, which I’m not going to do right now. Basically, you can see that it gave a solution and has the button right there to just clear the printer queue. It also shows the verification, so not anybody can just come on. Of course, you need a user anyways to enter the portal, but there’s just an extra level of security. I just wanted to show that before Liri showed other AI stuff because this is a really great way to make the most efficient use of your time so that your end users can be assisted by the AI assistant with more simple tasks, and then you can handle the nitty-gritty stuff. I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen. Take it away, Liri. 

Liri: Yes, as Sarah said, this is something that is not yet in production. It’s a little sneak peek of a real great powerful tool that can help you save time for yourself and make your end users more independent in doing things themselves and figuring out solutions. We’re actually providing you with another technician to the team. The tickets will be created in the system so you can keep track of everything that happened with the AI assistant as well. It’s not like it’s nowhere, and you don’t know what the end users tried to do or the issues that they had. It’s all going to be in your system. When you run a report, it will just add another technician that you can see. 

We have a follow-up question on that already in the Q&A section about creating scripts using the AI.

So as I showed before and Sarah showed on the customer portal, there is the AI system that will assist in generating scripts. The AI script generator is something bigger than that, which we have across everything in the platform. If you go to Admin and then Scripts, you’ll see that we added here a new AI generator. This is our shared script library. You have your scripts over here, and you have the shared script library with all the scripts of all the users in Atera. There are some scripts here that we created and uploaded, and some of them are from different users. You can sort it here to see the votes or the clones. We look and search for malicious content in the different scripts, but you’ll have to make sure that they work. If you go here to create a script, you’ll see that we have our new AI assistant in generating new scripts. As Sarah showed before, you can just enter your need over here, press generate, and it will generate a script for you. Again, this needs to be tested. You’ll need to run it to make sure that it gives the results that you need. For beginners who know how to read and use scripts but don’t really know how to write them and get the best results for a little bit more complicated tasks, this is a great solution that you can use. It will be added to your script library once you edit it. 

Another question that we have here is regarding our API. This is a very advanced question, and I’m not sure all of you are using APIs, but basically, APIs are the calls to add or receive information from the platform itself or to the platform itself. When I went to Admin under the API tab, we have the different areas of the platform with the different calls. You can take out different actions from the platform or you can post to the platform different things. You have all the information over here, and if you require any further help, you’re more than welcome to reach out to us. I guess if there’s a follow-up question on how to do it or if something is not clear, you’re more than welcome to ask. We’re here. # Creating Custom Statuses Sarah: Another question by Shirley. Sarah, do you want to take this one? 

Sarah: Sure, let me just take a look. So I will just share the question. How do we create custom statuses like “On Hold” or “In Progress”? Great question, Shirley. Now I need to figure out how to stop sharing the question. Okay, thank you. So I’m going to go ahead and share my screen. Something really helpful about Atera is that you can add a lot of custom fields. Again, sharing my screen, Liri, please confirm that you see the platform. 

Liri: Yes. 

Sarah: When you want to create any custom fields, you go to Admin and in Basic Setup, you can see Custom Fields. When I click Custom Fields, you can see all the different areas of the platform where you can add custom fields such as Ticket, Customer, Contact, Contract, etc. The question was about adding custom statuses, so that would be for Ticket. You can see that we have default fields that everybody will have, and you’re not able to delete those. But then you can add custom fields. You can see that we’ve added a lot, and you can edit them. To add a custom field, click Add Field. The target would be the Ticket. Again, it depends on what area you’re looking to add a custom field. Let’s say Ticket, and the type can be really customizable. You can do a checkbox, dropdown, text. For now, we’ll just say text, and we can say Ticket Status. Then you can decide whether it’s a required field for both the technicians and for the portal if it’s relevant. You can also decide if it’s relevant for your end users to use or not. Sometimes there are fields that you’re going to find important, but you don’t want the customers or the end users playing around with that. For now, I’ll just click Hide Field, but I will say that it’s a required field. When we go down to Ticket Custom Status, I’m going to edit this. If something has not gone correctly, give me one second. I’m going to stop sharing my screen and fix that. In the meantime, Liri, do you want to respond to the next question? 

Liri: Yes, there is currently no next question, so I do want to use the opportunity to tell you guys don’t be shy to ask questions. This is what we’re here for. I can take over from here if you have a problem on your end. I will just finish by saying that after you create the different custom fields, the custom fields are manual. You have to put in the information yourself. If it was a field that says your last visit on-site or things like that, this is to be manually updated. You can use the different custom fields in different areas of the platform. 

I will use the time until we have a new question to give two great tips. One of them will be for the filtering pages. Either the Devices page or the Ticketing page, those pages have different filters. The filters can be saved, so you can have different views for your needs. You don’t need to filter only the open tickets every time that you come. You can just save the view over here. With the filters, you can also create a filter of the custom fields that you have. I know that a lot of users want to see different views of different things that Atera doesn’t offer out of the box. You can just add the different fields and use them. For advanced users, you have custom fields, but you also have different advanced filters. Make sure that you check those out. Don’t waste your time doing things manually on the platform. This is a very important thing to say. We are trying to find different ways to save you guys time. That was one of the things that we added—more advanced filters for you to find and filter the right devices that you want to operate on and see in your different views. 

Sarah: Do you want me to share my screen again just to show the ticket field? 

Liri: Yes, of course. 

Sarah: Sorry, everybody, for the delay. Now you can see my platform again. Earlier, I created a text field, which means that it would be freeform. If the title of the field is Ticket Status, you would have to type that in. However, if you want something with different statuses, you can create them by selecting Dropdown and then adding values here. Let’s say “On Hold” and “Pending,” etc. That means that when you go to the ticket, you’ll be selecting from these options. I just wanted to clarify that there are a bunch of different options for that. Again, you have different options for all these different fields. Like Liri said, you can also filter based on these custom fields. 

Liri: The next question is, what happens to unattended tickets if no action is taken or it’s pending for three or more days? This goes into ticket automation rules and also a little bit of SLA. 

Let’s share the screen. Basically, I think what you were referring to is a great option that we have, as Sarah mentioned, under Admin: Ticket Automation Rules. Ticket automation rules allow you to add different rules for different conditions that you want to run automatically. This can be what technicians to assign, what templates to reply to automatically, and one of the actions that you can also do is “No reply to ticket in 24 hours.” These rules help automate processes within the ticketing system. You also have a great article on commonly used ticket automation rules that sum up some of the ones that we thought are very useful and time-saving.
Basically, all these different rules can be set with specific triggers, conditions, and actions. For example, if a ticket is in the status “New” for 24 hours, we’ll send some kind of email reminder to the actual technician. But if the ticket is pending, as you mentioned, for three days, you can also send an email to the customer saying, “We see that you no longer need our help here, and we will close the ticket.” The rule can also just close the ticket itself, so you don’t need to run those manual maintenance actions on your ticket queue. We know how long the ticket queue can become, and we don’t want to waste your time on non-important tasks. 

If Sarah already mentioned the SLA, I will show a little bit about that. Under Tickets, you’ll see here that our success team is falling behind a little bit with their SLA, the Service Level Agreement. This is something that comes from the contract of the customer that you have here. Different contracts can have an SLA. If I go to Admin, you’ll see three factors that create the different SLA for the different tickets. First, you’ll have to create a schedule for your business hours so we will know what times you are expected to work and respond to tickets. You can have different calendars, such as a VIP calendar with 10 hours a day and a regular calendar with eight hours. After that, you can set different SLAs for the tickets that come in and for closing the tickets. We have six levels of impact: no impact, minor, major, site down, server issue, and crisis. For each of them, you can decide the response time, which can be hours, minutes, or days, however is comfortable for you. Lastly, you apply the SLA to a contract. In the different contracts we have here, some of them don’t have an SLA, while others do. For customers not using the MSP version of our platform, the SLA wouldn’t fall under a contract but would fall directly under the department. In Atera, we have two different products: one focused on the MSP world with different customers and contacts, and one based on internal IT departments. 

Sarah: I just want to add to that. Like Liri said, it’s still available for IT departments and can be really helpful to monitor what your technicians are doing and keep track of everything. Even if you don’t have a contract, it’s still a great way to ensure tickets are getting handled in a timely manner. 

Liri: If we’re talking best practices here, I want to say that even if you are working in a company with your own IT department, keeping track of the effort that the team is doing and making sure everything is noted and reported is very important. This leads me to reporting. It’s essential to know the volume of work you’ve been doing, whether you’re an MSP showing effort to the customer and billing them, or an internal department assessing if you need more team members or different tasks. By working with the SLA and time entries that you can enter into the ticket, you’ll see that we have different reports showing how much time was spent and whether your technicians were within the SLA or falling behind. We also have advanced reports, which not a lot of customers know about. From the middle tier and up, you have some preset reports in the advanced reports section. The advanced report tool allows you to create your own reports, but this is relevant only for the highest tier. For the middle tier, we created some preset reports that you can also enjoy and use, such as the ticketing summary. 

Sarah: We have a question here. I’m looking for a solution that will give me the possibility to integrate and/or automate my accounting routine. Any ideas? 

Great news! Atera can integrate with your accounting solution. Let me go ahead and share my screen again. As Liri said, we have multiple products, one for IT departments and one geared towards MSPs. Luckily, I’m on the MSP version, so I can show you how it works with billing. To integrate your accounting solution, go to Admin and then Accounting. You can see we are integrated with QuickBooks Online and Xero. Simply click Connect, and it will prompt you to connect. Once you have a QuickBooks account, it syncs seamlessly. Before integrating, go to Admin first and add all your specific rates and products and expenses. Once integrated with QuickBooks, you will be able to edit the products and expenses in QuickBooks instead of Atera. If we’re already talking about billing, I can go through the flow quickly. Let’s say you have a ticket, and you resolve it. Change the ticket status from Open to Resolved and update it. To check what tickets are available for reporting, go to Classic Reports and then the Timesheet Report. This report shows what tickets are available for billing, the billing hours, the technician who worked on the ticket, etc. Once you check what you have to bill, go to Billing on the left-hand side and create an invoice batch. Create a new invoice batch, select the relevant contract, and push it directly to QuickBooks. If you have specific questions about this, attend our billing webinar or email [email protected] for more information. 

Liri: Just to add, the end of the flow that Sarah showed would be an actual invoice. If you’re integrated with your accounting platform, this invoice will be exported to your accounting platform, and all the billable information within Atera can be billed through your accounting platform.

Sarah: Do you want to take the next question? I can share it for the team. The question is, how do you get alerts? Can I only see them in the Alerts tab? 

Liri: Amazing. Okay, so how do you get alerts and where do you see them are two different questions, which I’ll be happy to go over. Basically, the alerts are coming from the threshold profile. I’ll show you, for example, under this device, you can see the different profiles that this device has. The threshold profile and the IT automation profiles. A threshold profile will generate the alerts. It could be only one profile for a device. The IT automation profiles, which I showed before, will patch your operating system, your software, and perform different maintenance tasks. You can have more than just one. Under Admin, as I showed you before, in Patch Management and IT Automation Profiles, you can see here the threshold profiles. You can have multiple profiles here for different needs. We create different presets that you can use, but you can also remove or edit the different items to make sure that we address the needs you need to be alerted about. For example, if a CPU load of 85% for nine minutes is too little for you, you can change it to 95% for 15 minutes. Add that, and it will be changed. Now you won’t get an alert for 85%, but you’ll get it for 95%. You can also add new items using our presets of different things within the platform, or you can use the custom tab or even script-based thresholds. If you want a script to check something with a limit, it can be added here. One of my favorite tips to save time and automate your tasks is to add an auto-healing script to each item. For example, for a CPU load, you can run a simple action like cleaning cache, cleaning browsing history, or even reboot. You can add the script here, and once the threshold hits, Atera will execute the script automatically, solving the alert before you even need to spend any time on it. The alerts will come to the Alerts tab, but if you want to get alerted in a different manner, you can go to Admin > Alert Settings. Here, you can choose to get an email for different alerts (warning, critical, resolved), decide who you want to be notified, and automate a ticket from different alerts. You can decide which customers you want to include. I recommend having all the customers here, even if you’re not billing them from the ticketing system or if it’s not in your SLA terms with the customer. Working with the ticketing system is the best way to keep track of everything. Lastly, you can have a sound notification in your platform. If you’re logged into the platform, you’ll get a little sound notification. So to answer the question, alerts can come to the Alerts page, to your email directly, and can be converted into a ticket automatically. 

Sarah: Maybe in the meantime, we can just remind everybody about our App Center. 

Liri: Yes, if you’re already sharing the screen. 

Sarah: While Liri is sharing the screen, I just want to remind everybody, whether you’re an IT department or an MSP, that we work with a lot of partners for backup, antivirus, remote access, remote monitoring, etc. If you’re ever looking for a solution like that, it’s good to check what we have in the App Center. Having everything in one place is really helpful. We’re here to make your lives easier. If you’re interested in any specific third-party, you can do a free trial to see how it works. You can also go in and see all the basic information. If it’s still not enough, you can reach out to us, and we will connect you to the relevant person. You have nothing to lose with a free trial. 

Liri: Yes, the different apps have various integrations and functionalities. For all of them, you’ll be billed from Atera. Some of them allow you to deploy endpoints from within the Atera agent and get alerts directly to the Atera platform. We’re here to make your life easier, integrating with great partners to do that. 

Okay, I have a license for a certain product. How can I centralize the payment for all the subscriptions related to Atera? 

If you’re talking about the App Center, we have migration options. If you are already a user of Acronis, reach out to our support or your customer success manager at [email protected], and we’ll help you migrate your account to Atera. We can sync your billing dates so you have everything billed from Atera. For now, you might have different invoices for different products, but everything will be centralized to one place. I hope that answered the question. Sarah, did you understand the question differently? 

Sarah: That’s also what I understood. Vincent, if you have something else you wanted to get out of that question, you can write again or reach out to us. 

Liri: I want to use the opportunity to share a great new release that I really like and think is very relevant for customers. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. It is related to patch management. Many people wanted more control over patches released and were afraid to use the IT automation profiles because they didn’t want patches to be released automatically before they checked them. A new release we have now allows you to create a new profile with OS patch management approval. When the automation runs for the first time, it will recognize the available patches. You can decide to postpone or approve the patches. You can manage your approval, decide how long to postpone them, and check them online or test them on one device in your in-house environment. You can then approve or exclude them. If the postpone time passes without approval or exclusion, they will be approved automatically. You can always go back and approve excluded patches. If you want to exclude a patch, I recommend doing it at the profile level, but we also have an exclude patches section for across all automation profiles. 

Sarah: There is a question about Asset Management. We do have Asset Management, which is relatively new. Let me share my screen. 

You can find Asset Management either in Customers or in Sites if you are an IT department. For example, go to a customer and open the Assets tab. This is where you can see your assets. Click the plus sign to create a new asset. Select a new asset type, such as headphones, add a specific name, description, and assign it to a customer. This is a great way to keep track. You can also attach it to a contact. If there are specific requests for Asset Management, add them to our Features board. We always want to hear from you if you like it or what could make it even more helpful. 

Liri: The second part of the question was about reports attached to Asset Management. This is a new feature and is not supported in classic reports. However, under Advanced Reports, you have an Assets report. This can be used when an employee leaves the company. You can filter for different employees under the customer’s name and get a view of all the assets they have in a single view. You can export and review it using this report. 

I’m afraid time is running out. I see a new question. Am I able to import passwords into Atera? 

Unfortunately, no, there’s no way to import passwords directly. You can manually add them under the customer page in the Passwords tab. We can check further, and it could be a great feature request. We are planning on integrating with Keeper for password management. 

Sarah: Just to add, you can also store passwords on a device level. If you want more information, check that out. 

Liri: Guys, I’m sorry, but we don’t have a lot of time to wrap up everything. I want to thank everyone for joining us today. It was a pleasure. Stay tuned for updates and changes coming soon. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.