Walkthrough of Atera’s solution for IT Departments

One moment while we change… Perfect. Something I just want to make sure that all of you know—some of you are long-term customers, and some of you are newer customers or you’re trialing. We put a lot of time and effort into making sure that you guys are well taken care of as our customers or customers-to-be. We have a lot of available resources that are at your fingertips. 

# Available Resources 

Meira: Firstly, we have our support team that is available on live chat 24/7. You can access that directly through the platform, and I’ll show you how in just a couple of minutes. We also have a Help Center where we have all of our knowledge-based articles. Everything here is well-documented with different information, graphics, images—whatever is there to help you best support yourself with the platform. We also have a blog, our Atera Community, which is kind of just like a space for all of our customers and IT enthusiasts to share their best tips and tricks—anything that they’re doing that they think is unique or they want to share with the community. It’s a great place to find different ways of using Atera that are best for you guys. Of course, we have our webinars, as you’re on one today. As you’ll know, we do them live every couple of weeks. We have a whole bunch of different topics, but they’re also recorded, and you can watch them on-demand in case you’re not able to be at any of them live. If there’s something you want to attend but it conflicts with your day-to-day schedule, we do have them recorded as well, so you can always watch them if you can’t attend live. 

# Platform Overview 

Meira: Okay, I think that’s all for this. I want to get straight into the platform because we do have quite a jam-packed agenda, and I’m just going to swap over my screens. Okay, let’s see if this should be working. Can I just see that my screen is sharing? Nope, let’s just stop this for a second. Okay, just a moment. Sorry about this, guys. Classic happens to me—everything was working fine earlier, and now technology wants to get a little bit disruptive with me. Let’s try this again. Okay, now it should be working. Wonderful. So as you can all see, this is the Atera dashboard. This is where you’ll have a bird’s eye overview of everything that’s happening on your account. Basically, here you’ll be able to see all these different widgets that belong to the account. You can move things around—hold up just a minute—you can move the different widgets around as you need. Not working with me right now, but you can see here—you can organize them as you need to, and you can also choose which different widgets you want to have on this bird’s eye view. You see here you have all of the options that you can take any of these off and reset to default if you need. Over here at the bottom, let me just move my screen—you’ll be able to see the little question mark icon. If you open that up, firstly, you get a link to our Help Center, which is where all of our knowledge-based articles are stored. You have a link to the community as well as product updates. Those of you who are with us today who have been with us for a long time know that we make a lot of frequent updates—changes in a good way, right? We’re always staying ahead of the curve. We’re always making sure Atera is as sharp as possible for you guys. So you’ll know that we often have a lot of updates. First, you’ll be able to see what’s updated with our latest features, any webinars, events, and our roadmap. You can start a live chat for our support, which works 24/7, as I mentioned, as well as get any answers that you need for Atera using our AI functionality over here. This feature over here is available to all Atera customers, whether you have the AI copilot or not. If, let’s say, I want to automate tasks with scripts, you’ll see here you’ll get an answer from the AI system directly. So I’ll just let that load for a minute, and you’ll see this also comes from our KBS. If it still doesn’t help you, you can go directly and start a live chat. This is just something really useful for you guys to know. 

# Setting Up Sites 

Meira: And as well, for any of our new customers or existing customers, obviously, it’s important that you know about this little functionality of the question mark icon over there. Okay, so like I mentioned, to get started, what we would start doing when we have an ITD walkthrough—the first thing you want to do is set up your sites. The reason being is that when you bring on your devices and you download the Atera agent, you want everything to be as organized as possible. So when you do bring the devices on, everything can be as organized and as neatly kept as possible. To do that, you’ll see over here in the navigation dashboard we have a few different things, but let’s start off with sites. You can see here you have all the different sites that belong to your organization—or let’s say in our demo account, this belongs to our organization. If I wanted to create a new site, I could create one manually from scratch, and I would just fill in all this information over here. So let’s say if I wanted to make it Atera’s webinars, if I wanted to choose what state it was, etc., enter all the details, and I could create the site manually. If I want to just show you one that’s already existing for time purposes and also one that’s got more information, I can take a look at one that we have here. Again, this is our demo account, so bear with me while I’ll show it to you. We have the overview—everything that’s going on with all the details that belong to this specific site, any users that are associated with this specific site, and also, of course, your main user within each of these users as well. Something important that I always want customers to know is you have your details here for the portal, which is something we’ll get to a little bit later on. But this is where you as a technician or an admin can come in and make updates or changes to that. You’ll see here any tickets associated with that user and also a password manager. I’m just going to go back to the site for a second. On the specific site, any devices that are actually assigned to the site or associated with it—you can also favorite your devices as well. Here we have our AI copilot, which I’ll show you guys in a little bit. Here you have any assets that are associated with this specific site—for instance, any kind of equipment or inventory that you have that you can’t actually put an Atera agent on, for example, a keyboard, a mouse, a screen, etc. You can see they’re all under a folder called “Atera’s Webinars” that I’ve specifically done, and we’ll get to that in a second as well. Next up, we have tickets that are associated with this specific site—so any devices that are associated with this site, all those tickets come up here or any ticket requests. We have any alerts that come up for this specific site as well as passwords. This is a password manager, right? So you can keep track of any passwords that belong to the specific site, but it’s just more of a management feature. It’s not going to auto-populate or protect any passwords for you—it’s just for you to keep track and organize. If you want to put any attachments—for instance, if one of your sites is maybe a headquarters or any of your sites you need to store information for the end users or anyone that goes to visit this site often—maybe there’s some kind of Wi-Fi codes or passwords, etc. You can keep like a PDF or any kind of attachment on that. Or maybe if there’s a specific entrance they need to use—any of the technicians—you mean the opportunities are endless there. It’s for you to see how you want to use it. And then our work-from-home addon. If you have that, you’d find it here. I’m just going to see if there’s any comments coming up. Perfect, cool. 

# Managing Folders and 

Meira: Importing from Azure AD So something I wanted to show you guys as well—I mentioned earlier we have folders from sites. Under sites in your devices tab, you have the option here—and I hope you can see, yeah, you should be able to—I’m clicking on actions, and you can click on manage folders. Here I’ve already added a folder, but folders really help you keep track of everything that you want to do with either a specific site or specific kinds of devices or maybe specific kinds of users. You can use these folders to organize your IT real estate as well as your end users, and I’ll explain to you what I mean. For instance, if you want to assign specific IT automation policies or threshold profiles and you want to do it in bulk through folders, this is the best way to do it. For instance, if you want to assign all PCs with specific kinds of policies, you can have a folder specifically for PCs and assign everything there, just as an example. Or for instance, maybe in your organization you have some senior-level managers who—the way you look after their devices is a little bit different from the rest of the company—you can also have a folder for, let’s say, senior managers. I’ve seen quite a few customers do that as well. So right now, like I said, we’ve been looking at sites. But let’s say you work for a bigger organization and you have many sites, or your sites are quite detailed and you don’t want to have to put in everything manually. We do have the option for an Azure AD sync. So if you click here, you can import from Azure AD, and you would have to connect it, of course. But the important thing from here is that this sync enables you to have a one-way sync from Azure AD into Atera. It will update any existing contacts—hold on one second—there we go. It will update any existing contacts, and it will create any contacts that are in Azure that are not in Atera just yet. And it’s a secure sync. You can also initiate on-demand syncs, right? So let’s say you set up your account, you do the Azure AD sync, and then a couple of days later there’s more updates or information. You can do a manual sync or an on-demand sync. If any of you are on the Enterprise package, you will find that you’ll have a continuous sync, which means you don’t have to do anything manually—it automatically does the updates for you. And if any of you want to be on the Enterprise package for this feature or any other features, you can just let us know and you can also write to [email protected], and we’ll make sure we can give you all of that information. 

# Installing Agents 

Meira: Perfect. Before I carry on, I’m just checking if everyone’s good, everyone’s following. Seems like we’re okay. Wonderful. So once you’ve set up your sites, the next thing you want to do is get all of your devices in, right? So one of the ways you can do that is to install an agent. So you’ll click over here on “Install an Agent” and then you’ll follow the prompts or the steps that follow. You’ll choose an OS. Now remember, this is going to be for the end device. So let’s say today I’m using a Mac—it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to choose the OS as a Mac. I’m deciding if I’m a technician, what is my end user using? Let’s say they’re using a Windows device. I’ll click next. I’ll pick the site of—let’s see—I’m going to use our customer success site, and I’m going to just for today’s webinar pick my folder with my webinars. But for instance, if you are giving this to—you’re adding a new device that belongs to a specific user that either you have a folder for PCs or for specific kinds of users like different managers, etc., you can automatically have this directly being added to that site in that folder. Then you click next. So now we have a few different options for actually downloading the agent. The first option is to download the agent installer, and that’s obviously if you’re going to be doing it on the specific device. And if I’m downloading it to my device, but let’s say you’re wanting to do this for an end user, you have the option to install the agent via the command prompt using the script. And you’ll see here, if I had to keep going on that, the ID does include the folder that I’ve created as “Atera’s Webinars” as well as a site—you do see that coming up there. Or if you want to send the installer link directly to the user, this is the link that you use. I’m going to just cancel that for now. 

# Managing Devices 

Meira: Amazing. So once you’ve done this, the next thing that you’ll do is you’ll find that all of your devices will be here. Let’s say you’ve gone and done this on a couple of different devices—they’ll all show up on your devices page. Here you see the device name, you’ll see our AI copilot, which I’ll come to in a minute, the last login, availability, device type, etc., etc. Something to note is that all of these columns are adjustable—you can move them around. You have available patches if you want to take any actions from there, and pending reboot, etc. For these different devices, you can also manage them. I want to look at a specific device, so I’m just going to search for it. Great. So like I mentioned earlier, you can also favorite any devices. But for instance, if I wanted to take any actions on this specific device, I could do patch management actions, software inventory, etc. I can do shutdown actions, any apps that are deeply integrated that I’m able to deploy through Atera—you’ll find them up here. And then more tools. What’s important here—and something I’m going to come back to a little bit later—is that you have the option to install a help desk agent on the service tray for Windows devices through this action over here. 

# Device Agent Page 

Meira: Something else on the devices page that I want to show you is—firstly, we can click into the device itself. And this here, you’ll see the agent page for the specific device. It’s been recently revamped, so those who are older customers or have been with us for a while know that this is brand new, really fresh, and a lot of it is feedback from what our existing customers wanted that our product team was able to implement. So don’t ever be shy to give us product feedback because it really does help us make our product better. Again, here you can also move the different columns around. You can then reset the page if you want to, but you’ll see all the information that’s relevant for the specific agent on this device. Over here you have the overview, hardware, disk, OS and security, custom fields. Something new here we have is script-based custom fields. We have also our password manager. Again, you can add attachments and any monitored devices. On the side here, you have all the metrics, you have the activity log, you have any alerts if they were for the specific device. So this one is a demo, so it may not be if I click the filters.

# Device 

Meira: Actions and AI Co-Pilot Maybe we’ll see something, seems like not. Here are all the IT automation profiles that we’re going to look into in a little bit, but you’ll also find them here and you’ll be able to edit and reassign directly from the devices page, which is something new. It was requested, and we’ve been able to implement it. You can also take shutdown actions, so anything you need to do here from the agent page directly. You can also remote in if you have Splashtop or AnyDesk for free, but also if you have TeamViewer or ScreenConnect. You can create a ticket directly from the devices page if you want. Something I really wanted to show you guys—I’m going to just go out for a second. Hold on. Perfect. So I wanted to just have a quick look at our AI Co-Pilot. I’m sure a lot of you guys have heard that we’re going in the direction of AI or we’re heavily powered by AI. It’s something we’ve been working on since 2017, I believe. We got our patent, so it’s not something new to us, but now it’s being fully integrated within Atera. This is something that’s really interesting and probably relevant to a lot of you. You guys can correct me if I’m wrong, but we know from speaking to customers that a lot of IT departments are overstretched with resources. You have big organizations that you’re trying to manage; often your teams are quite small, and you’re needing to be the superheroes in every way, right? What I love about our Co-Pilot is that it’s able to act as an invisible technician and help you brainstorm different things that you may need from it. For instance, some examples: – What can I do to make this device more secure? – Which printers are installed on this device? – Which network adapter is enabled? – What’s the CPU usage and top running processes? I know often when I speak to customers, if I ask them how they would solve something like this, there’s a checklist that they would go through, and they’re having to brainstorm a lot. But in a couple of seconds, you can get answers from the Co-Pilot directly for what you need. What’s unique and great about this is that the agent is actually scanning the specific device and giving you feedback. Yes, I hear oftentimes, “We have ChatGPT,” but ChatGPT can’t actually scan your device and then give you feedback on it. I just want to mention this and show you. In a couple of seconds, it will come up with the top five running processes, what the CPU usage is, and give us some steps to remediate. While that is loading, I’m just checking everyone’s good in the chat. I know Eric gave a thumbs up earlier. If anyone else is good, feel free to add a thumbs up just to make sure you guys are still here. Wonderful. This gives us some good output, some steps we can take, and shows us what we’re doing or what we have with our CPU usage over here. 

# Dynamic Views and Advanced Filters 

Meira: Something else I wanted to show you guys—I’m just going to exit from this for a second—is that you can also create dynamic views of your devices. Currently, now we’re on a default view, but if you add different filters, you can see here you have a whole bunch of variability you can add for different departments, sites, etc. You can save it as a different view. For instance, if I wanted to save all of my servers or have a look at online PCs, you have that customization and granularity that you can use and save as different views. I’m going to go back to the default for a second. Something also new that some of our long-term customers may not have seen or may not be aware of but is super important is we now have advanced filters on the devices page. Again, this kind of gives you that granularity to see where your IT stack is at and any changes you want to make or how you want to go about managing these devices. For instance, if I wanted to say here where the OS edition equals—I could just put as an example—and maybe I want to say where free space is greater—oh no, I’m going to say free space is less than—I’m just going to put 10 gigs just as an example, and we’ll see what kind of view I get. Okay, so nothing here, but that’s because of the folders that I chose. But you guys understand where I’m going with this. If I apply this, we’ll see all of those devices that have a specific software upgrade or maybe need a specific software upgrade or where they’re at. So that’s really nice to have as well in our advanced filters. You have a lot of granularity with your AND/OR over here. 

# Saving Views 

Meira: Perfect. Okay, so the next thing we want to be able to do is—oh sorry, before I move on, I just want to show you guys something else. With your views, you can save it as private or as public. Hold on—I’ll show you guys that in a second—but you can basically save it as a private view or a public view so that only you can see something or your whole team can. We’ll come back to that in a minute. 

# Thresholds and Alerts 

Meira: Next up, I want to move on to thresholds. So now let’s say we’ve installed our agents, we have our devices, now we want to start monitoring things. What we’ll do is we’ll see here—this is where the actual alerts come up. I’m going to just clear all these filters. This is where the alerts come up. But how do we get alerts to be populated, right? We have to set something up to be able to get these results. So we do that from our threshold profiles. Basically, what the threshold profiles do is they have a set of circumstances, and if these circumstances are breached or met, then an alert will go off—an alert will be created. For the purpose of today’s webinar, I’m going to use my own thresholds over here. Firstly, you’ll see we have a whole bunch of different presets that we can offer you guys so that you at least have a good groundwork or starting point of different measurements that you want to be keeping track of. We have for our PC, Mac, laptop, Linux, and server. You also will see that we have performance, hardware, and exchange—different categories. Within that, we have critical alerts and warnings, so you’ll see the colors vary. Now, for us, we’ve set these quite conservatively just to make sure that you have a wider net of being able to catch anything that should arise with your devices. If anything is briefly exceeded, it should create an alert. But oftentimes, customers say it creates quite a lot of alerts, so you have this granularity and flexibility that you can change the percentage, the time period, any kind of metrics for these specific thresholds that make it better or more in line with the way your organization works. Something else you can also do is attach an auto-healing script, which means if a threshold is breached, a script will automatically be implemented to resolve that issue, which takes a lot of manual work off your hands because something can be resolved in the background without you actually even having to do anything. Something else we also give you guys the option for is being able to create custom thresholds yourselves. For instance, if you want to use any of our presets, you have different options over here. You can use a custom one from scratch, and you have different options with the categories that we have over here to choose exactly what you want. You can choose the alert severity and again choose, for instance, failed attempts or time period and add an auto-healing script. If that’s still not enough, you could still add an additional threshold, which is a script-based threshold, and you can add in all the information here that you need that would make that relevant for you guys. Now, what’s important here is once you have the setup, you’re going to need to assign it somewhere, right? To make it easy for you, we give you the profile assignment directly over here. You can assign it to a specific site, to a specific folder. For instance, if I went to our customer success folder and I looked for my—sorry, our customer success site—looked for my folder, I’d find it over here. Or you can assign it to an agent. Depending on what you need, you have that ability to make the assignment over here. 

# Scripting Functionality 

Meira: I mentioned in the threshold that you have the options for scripting, and I want to show you a little bit about our scripting functionality. Here, firstly, you have all of your scripts. In my case, I have 187 scripts available. You can search for different scripts via category, script name, etc., and you can also look in our shared script library where different Atera customers have added their own scripts. We screen these scripts for malware and make sure they’re secure, but we don’t screen them for functionality, so I always just want to give you guys a heads up there. But it has about 998 scripts, so if you’re looking for something that you can’t find, you should be able to find it here. More importantly, you can also create a script with our AI script generator. I’m not sure—maybe we can have a show of hands in the chat—how many of you guys are actually doing scripting manually. A lot of ITD customers who I speak to are doing this, and I can only imagine the time that it takes to actually do the manual, you know, write the script out manually, do all the checks, everything that you need. It takes a hell of a lot of time, and hopefully, we can simplify this for you. For instance, if you wanted to have a script to execute some kind of activity or action, you could literally type in anything that you wanted over here in this checkbox. Something else to note is that you can drag it down. I know some of my customers don’t know about that until I show them. For today’s session, I’m just simply going to choose an example. I will just click on the first one and I’ll click generate. What you’ll see is it takes a couple of seconds just to give me a script and also gives the script a name, a file type—which you can change if you need—a script description, you can change any more properties, and you have the answer here. I’m just choosing examples from here, but you can choose anything you want. I’ve done quite complex scripts—or I’m not necessarily the biggest scriptor—but I’ve used this to do quite complex scripts that simplify it in a couple of seconds and give you everything you need. 

# Alerts Page

Meira: Perfect. I’m going to go now, just backtracking a little bit, to our alerts page. So if you had set up your thresholds the way that you wanted them and they were all working correctly, you would start seeing alerts popping up over here. I’m just going to clear all of these. Okay, open. Great. Let me just drag this open a tiny bit. Amazing. So here you have your alert titles, again our AI functionality. For instance, if you wanted to double-check where this alert stands, you can recheck all the metrics, see which device it’s associated with, which site it’s associated with, when it was created, which category it is, the severity, etc. You can also take action specifically from the alert itself. You can see how integrated the platform is that you can do different actions from each of the different viewpoints or different pages. Something I think we do really well. You can also, if you wanted to, create a ticket directly from the alert itself. For instance, if I click on this “Create a New Ticket,” you’ll see it automatically populates all the information that’s associated with that alert within the ticket, and it already gives it a site and everything that I need to have it included.

# Alert Settings 

Meira: Perfect. Again, you can use the AI functionality which I mentioned, but that’s just the overview of alerting. Something else that’s relevant for alerts is the alert settings. This will dictate how some of the alert functionality works and, in more detail, what should be done when an alert is created. For instance, if an alert is created, do you want someone to be emailed? Do you want to be emailed? Do you want the team to be emailed? If so, what kind of alerts that are being created would you want to receive an email on? We have the option of warning, critical, or resolved, and we also have a time period where you’re able to have these emails sent out. You can also have a ticket automatically created via an alert. For instance, maybe on specific sites, you want specific alerts or critical alerts for one site to create a ticket and warning alerts for other sites to create a ticket. Again, this is just showing you the automation and hopefully taking some of the manual work from you guys that we’re able to do instead. If you really want, you can also have sound alerts. A funny story—I actually once had the sound alerts on and I couldn’t figure out where a sound was coming from in my computer. It was coming up every couple of seconds, so for now I’ll keep this off, but just know you do have this option. We give you a broad range of options here. 

# Patch Management and IT Automation Profiles 

Meira: Okay, so I’m going to stop for a minute and just make sure we’re all good. Thumbs up in the chat. I know we do have an interactive audience; I’m expecting at least one person with a thumbs up. Okay, brilliant. Thank you guys. Perfect. Now we’re going to start on more of the automation profiles. I’m going to move into that on this side over here. Here we have our patch management and IT automation profiles. This is where you’re able to automate some of that patching and software IT automations, etc. You can have as many profiles as you want. We encourage you to use our granularity to be able to use the different profiles for different needs. I’m going to open that up in a second and show you, but before we get into that, I just want to show you two settings that are part of this patch management and IT automation functionality. 

# Excluded Patches 

Meira: Firstly, here we have excluded patches. Here you can choose any patches you want to be excluded from your patching profiles and IT automation profiles on a global level. So in all of the profiles that you create, you can have specific patches that will be excluded. If, for instance, there’s a faulty patch that you’ve dealt with in the past, you can have it excluded. You have the option to search for patches via description, product class, or size. 

# Offline Agent Settings 

Meira: Here we have the settings for how a patch or profile should run for an agent that is offline. This dictates how long the automation will be in the queue for a profile that was supposed to be scheduled for a specific time and the device was offline. How long should we run that offline agent for or have it in the queue? 

# Creating Profiles 

Meira: Okay, I’m going to go into a profile itself. Let’s go into—where’s my webinar profile? Great. Nope, not this one. Just bear with me for a second. Okay, I’ll just take this one; this works. Firstly, as you can see here, we have our specific profile—IT automation profile—that we can create. Our best practice or best recommendation is that you create them in silos. So you have, let’s say, OS management, software management, and more hardware and maintenance—that’s how I like to describe it. Over here, you have all of your patch management in this, let’s say, silo or pillar. You can do a few cool things. What I like to suggest is you have software bundles. Here you can create bundles for Windows or Mac devices. Let’s click on Windows. This will come from Chocolatey or Homebrew if you’re using the public software repository. If you’re on the Enterprise plan, you can use a private software repository for this. For instance, what I like to do is create a bundle for new employees. Let’s say you can add a whole bunch of different software. If we wanted to use a specific bundle that’s selected, then you can click “Run the profile on newly installed agents,” which means anytime your organization gets a new employee, you can have the Atera agent automatically—let’s say as soon as the Atera agent is downloaded—you have this bundle automatically deployed, which I think is great. You can also attach scripts to these profiles. You saw how our script functionality works; you can use that too. You can also use the schedule. Let’s say if I wanted to add a schedule, you have a lot of granularity. If I wanted to do it monthly or weekly, every Wednesday at 1:00 a.m.—usually that’s after Patch Tuesday. Something to note about this—this is 1:00 a.m. based on the time zone that you have set up in your general settings. I can go and show you guys that, but for instance, if you have end users or different sites in different locations around the world, you want to just be careful of—or you want to be more aware of—how you’re setting up these different schedules based on what time it’s actually going to trigger for your other sites if you have them in different states or different locations. 

# OS Patch Approval Settings 

Meira: Something else I want to just show you before I come back to the patch management over here. These OS patch approval settings—you can have any postponed or excluded. This is for the specific profile itself. The one that I showed you earlier was on a global level, and this is more on a local level. For instance, if you want to have any of these updates delayed because you want to check them first, you can. Of course, critical updates we maybe don’t usually recommend postponing, but if you wanted to, you could postpone it for 14 days before auto-approving or, you know, one day—whatever you prefer. All of this is at your fingertips, and you can decide on how you want to go forward with it. Of course, you can exclude any OS patches by just searching for the KB or description, etc. We see here this one already has a postponed or excluded patch. You can see here it’s excluded, so it’s just to show you that you have not only this granularity on a global level but also on a local level. 

# Reboot Configuration Policies 

Meira: If we’re going to be looking at patch management over here and we have all of these patches ticked, some of them will need a reboot for the patch to be fully deployed. If you’ve clicked the reboot if needed, this will pretty much happen immediately after the profile is run. But if, for instance, some of you maybe want to have granularity or want to have more control over when the reboot actually happens, you can set up a configuration policy. This will allow you to better control when the reboot actually goes off and make sure that your end users are either aware of when it’s going to happen or available and it doesn’t cause any disruptions. Something to mention—just going to open that up—something to mention is that this is currently only available for Windows. For any Windows devices, this works, and I’m sure it will be coming for other devices soon enough. Let’s look at our configuration policies. If I click into one of these that are already here, you’ll be able to see we have a name, a description if needed, and then here we have all of our options and how we can adjust the settings as best as we want. For instance, you can choose Windows update restart configurations, revert to device settings, disable auto restart, restart out of active hours—I know some of my customers specifically prefer that—allow end users to control devices, and with this, you get the option of allowing them to, for a lack of a better word, snooze or delay the reboot for X amount of time after which you’ll have a forced restart. You can also customize the message. I’ve seen a lot of my customers have funny IT messages over here. We all know the IT people in our organization are really the true superheroes, so I have seen some funny and catchy things to make sure that our end users do the reboot when needed. I’m just going to click on this just so it goes back to our demo settings. But you have, again, all of these different options, and you can assign the configuration policies again on a site level, on a folder level, or on an agent level. 

# Question and PSA 

Meira: Side of Things I did see in the chat we have a question for showing an example of the software bundle for new users. I’d be happy to do that. I want to just make sure I’m keeping up to date with the time, so I may come back to that at the end if that’s okay. We’re going to move on to more of the PSA side of things. Besides that question, everyone’s good? Thumbs up again in the chat. I just need to make sure you guys are all taken care of. 

# Ticketing Interface 

Meira: So now we’re going to start looking a little bit at the ticketing side of things. Firstly, this is our ticketing interface. This is where you see all of your tickets that have been created for all of your devices, requests, etc. We have a couple of different ways where tickets are created. Firstly, as I showed you earlier, you can get a ticket automatically created from an alert. You can get a ticket created from your support email when an end user sends you an email—it can have a ticket automatically created. I’ll show you how to do that. You can have a ticket manually created by one of your technicians directly in the system. You can have a ticket created via the help desk agent that you will be able to enable or activate on the service tray for your end users, which is kind of what I showed you earlier, and I can go back to that as well. And of course, the customer portal which your end users can use. Firstly, these will be all of your tickets over here. You can bulk select them, you can assign them, set a status, priority, and merge any if you need to. You’ll also see again our Co-Pilot functionality—I’ll come back to that in a second. You can assign a technician, set the priority status, activity status, and the status of the ticket. Again, you can create different views. For instance, if you want to create views for each of your different technicians or each of your different sites depending on how your organization works and what you guys need to be doing for them and for yourselves. You also have the option to have scheduled tickets. This is really good for maintenance or maybe, let’s say, once a month you’re going around in the office and checking the printers for ink, for paper—all these kinds of things. You can set up scheduled tickets as reminders to do all of those maintenance tasks that you need to do. If I wanted to, for instance, just look at the Co-Pilot again, seeing it in a different format—it’s unified across the platform but seeing it somewhere else. Let’s see. Okay, great. It’s loading for you guys as well. This is a great way to get, let’s say, a summarized and solved quick snapshot of what’s happened with the ticket. Maybe one of you guys, as a manager of the team, or one of your technicians is helping out for another technician, and there’s been a lot of back and forth with the end user. You kind of just want to get a quick brief update on what’s happened on this ticket, where does it stand now, what do I need to do going forward. This is the perfect way to do it. You’ll see you get here a nice bulleted summary. You’ll see all the tests that were done with the metrics, and you’ll also get a solution and a response that you can give to the end user.

# AI Functionality and Ticketing 

Meira: It does take a couple of seconds, maybe sometimes a couple of minutes, but as I’ve mentioned, the agent is actively scanning the device. It’s also obviously going through the ticket, seeing what’s actually been there. We don’t expect it to be instant; we want it to be interactive with all of your devices, your tickets, etc. So I’m not worried about this—only for time’s sake, I may just move on because I want to make sure I can get through everything that we need to. Perfect. If I click into a specific ticket itself, you’ll see here you have the status of the ticket, who is the technician, what’s the type of ticket, and you have the option to give a public reply or an internal note. That’s to, let’s say, one of your colleagues—you can tag them. Something interesting about a public reply: if I want to just say, just as an example over here, you have the option to change the phrasing or the verbiage that’s been used on the specific ticket. For instance, maybe you have a junior technician who’s still learning the ropes, or let’s say your organization works in English but your IT department is based around the world and English is not their native language. You have different options of using our AI functionality for that. Firstly, you can generate a reply for this ticket specifically. You can also rephrase. For instance, if I want it more casual or maybe if I’m speaking to the CEO or just my colleague who I can be more casual with. We have the option for all these different things—something that I really love and I think is amazing for you guys as IT departments or internal IT departments for organizations. 

# Creating Knowledge Base Articles 

Meira: Let me just change the view one second. Where are my resolved tickets? Perfect. This is now another option we have, also without AI but specifically for ticketing. You can take a ticket that’s been resolved and create a knowledge-based article directly. I don’t know how many of you guys are using our knowledge base functionality—you can use it firstly for your technicians and also for your end users. My best practice or best recommendation for this, specifically for end users, is that oftentimes they come to you for issues that could technically be resolved by themselves. As I mentioned, you guys often have small teams servicing big organizations, and you don’t necessarily have the extra time or capacity to deal with extra issues or tickets that could be resolved directly by end users more independently. For instance, if I’m going to—let’s see—I’ll try with this Google access issue. You’ll see here I’m in the body of the ticket itself. This works best with resolved tickets—that’s why I specifically chose that. I can generate an article. Let’s see. Can you guys see this? Nope, you should be able to see it now. It’s opened up a new tab; it’s generating an article directly from the ticket. You’ll see it takes a couple of seconds, and not only that, it sets it out in a really nice, easy, readable format. So me, if I’m a technician from an IT department, I can come in, create a whole range of different knowledge-based articles that I could share either with my team internally or with end users and help everyone either resolve their own tickets or create a best practice or a standard that we use. Especially if it’s, for instance, for a ticket that you’ve resolved—it’s a flow that you’re already using and that you like. Again, it’s customizable to your specific team and your organization. You can add in a heading, an article title, what kind of priority it is, any keywords, and then you can put it in any section or category that you need to as well. I really like this feature. 

# Knowledge Base 

Meira: Great. Let me just show you where you find the knowledge base. Here internally, this is where you would find—hold on one second—it’s not letting me click on it. There we go. Here is where you would see the knowledge base with all of your articles that you’ve created. Something I wanted to show you guys as well is I’ve created one—you can see here “Atera’s Webinars”—that’s specifically a private ticket. So let’s say it would only be for my technicians on my team and end users wouldn’t be able to see it. To just check that it worked, I added some fun attachments. 

# Customer Portal 

Meira: Great. Let me just check that we’re doing okay for time. We do have one or two things left that I just want to show you guys, and I just want to check that you’re okay. Perfect. So I’m not going to get too much into the depths of ticketing. We do have a lot of webinars that focus on that as well, and I want to make sure we can cover some other things. Something I think is underutilized by some of our customers, especially IT departments, is being able to use the customer portal for your end users so they can log their tickets there and also use the knowledge base there. For instance, if you click on admin and you search for the portal, firstly, you’re able to white-label it and customize it. Hold on. Yes, it should be sharing again. You can customize your portal specifically to your organization with color, a logo, etc. But the specific service portal, if I had to click on this copy over here, it would take me into—hold on, is it not sharing the second screen? There we go—it would take me into this portal over here. As I mentioned earlier, this is a demo account, so just ignore any of the functionality that you guys don’t have yet. What’s important here is that your end users are able to come in and create tickets themselves. You’ll see all of the tickets that they’ve created. This is me logged in specifically as an end user. But let’s say, for instance, I had an issue with setting up Office 365 and I wanted to come in and resolve it myself. I’d be able to use the knowledge base functionality that you guys as technicians have created, but hopefully through the ticket-to-KB functionality, they’d be able to come in and answer any of the questions or issues they have themselves and also create a ticket manually if needed. 

# Reports 

Meira: Let me just share this again. So like I mentioned to you guys earlier, if you go into your site specifically—let’s just see, it’s sharing—yes, you would be able to find the portal username and login for your end users and you’d be able to send that out to them and make sure that they could log in. Perfect. Lastly, just for the last couple of minutes, I wanted to have a look at reports. Firstly, you’ll be able to see here we have our classic reports and also advanced reports. Our classic reports are more preset, out-of-the-box reports that you can have a look at over your Atera instance. For instance, you could have a look at load analysis, see what’s going on here. If I had to just pick a specific site, you can generate reports and you can export them. We have a whole bunch of classic reports and we also have a whole bunch of advanced reports. There are about seven presets depending on which plan you’re on. Then we also have the option of creating an interactive reporting dashboard. If you’re on the Enterprise plan as well, you have that option where you can actually build your own dashboard from one of the data sets that we have, which you can see is quite extensive over here. What’s great about this is that you get to expand the reach that you have as an IT department beyond just doing IT tasks. You get to show value to the whole organization in general, whether it be from different ticketing, from an HR perspective—all these kinds of things. You get to show different value and reports and capabilities and bring that to the team. 

# Q&A and Wrap-Up 

Meira: Okay, we’re about to be finishing up soon. I just want to check that everyone is good and make sure you’re all okay. Let’s see if there’s any questions we need to answer. Let me just have a look. It seems like everything’s answered. The one question we did get earlier in the chat was an example of the software bundle. I do see now, Jake, you have a question about ticket automation rules. I haven’t done that yet only because we do have a webinar specifically on ticketing. I’m happy to go through that as well and also the software bundle. So let’s do both of them. Firstly, if I go over here, we have the option for software bundles. Let’s say I wanted to create a new bundle. Let’s do it like this. I’m going to create a Windows bundle. I’m going to say “new employees,” and let’s say I wanted to search for a couple of things. Let’s do Slack, add, and let’s do—these are just examples that are easy for me to find. This is actually something great that I wanted to show you. So any of you that are on the Enterprise plan and have access to the custom or the private software repo, you have your own custom software that you’re able to access anywhere in the platform but also in these bundles as well. So let’s just say I wanted to add that too. Let me just move this. Great. Then we click create and I would click select. You’ll see here now the “new employees” bundle, and what you would do is run the profile on newly installed agents. My best recommendation would be to not have anything else—just have that software bundle as an option there. So I hope that answers that question. The next question was regarding ticket automation rules, and that’s basically different automations for when tickets come in—either they’re assigned to a specific technician or they’re time-based. Again, the possibilities are infinite, and we do have a whole ticketing webinar that can address all of these kinds of questions. But basically, what’s important for me to mention is all of the ticket automation rules are in hierarchy. So depending on how you have them set up, they go one after the other. But if you wanted to have a new rule, let me just say as an example, a new ticket is created. I’m going to make it not active for the meantime. Let’s say for the ticket property, let’s say activity status equals—let’s say—no, actually let’s change it. Let’s say if it came from a specific company or specific site, or even, you know what, site name—let’s make it from—it’s not coming up with that today, so we will change it. Let’s change it to the source. Let’s say it came through an email. Then the action—what should happen if a ticket comes through email? Let’s say it should be assigned or send an email to, let’s say, myself. And what kind of email should I send myself? These are all the different email templates we have. Let’s say send details of customer response, and then you could add it and have that go off. Again, like I said, the possibilities are endless, and I’d be happy to send you guys— you can also see here all of the places where you have “learn more” within the platform. You have the option to see—let’s just change this—all of our ticket automation rules that come from our KBS. So anywhere you see “learn more” in the platform, you have that option. I want to just be respectful of your time, and I’m sure our session will automatically log off soon. So before we jump off, I just want us to have—we’re going to set up a poll or launch the poll so that we can get your feedback on the session. I’m not sure if it’s already been set up, if it’s been launched, and if you can see it, let me know. Jake, the next webinar for ticket automations—I’m actually not sure, but if you want to send me an email to [email protected], I will update you and let you know. But also, I’m sure we do have on-demand webinars for ticketing as well, so I’ll get back to you on that. Perfect. Let’s just see if we have any other questions before we jump off. Feel free also to add your feedback in the session, everyone, in the chat about the session. Also, I just want to see if our poll’s been launched. Can you guys confirm for me if you can see it or the survey? Let’s see. Should be now. Let me know if you guys are able to see it. Great, Colton, thank you. Let me know you can see it. Amazing. Perfect. So I think with that, we’ll wrap up. I want to be, like I said, respectful of your guys’ time. I know you’re probably super busy and you’ve made time to join us today. So firstly, thank you to all of you. If you have any questions or anything wasn’t clear, feel free to reach us at [email protected]. Stay tuned for more webinars—you’ll be able to find all of the recordings on demand. Thank you guys all for coming today.