F4SD Update Enables Customization
Write your own script
The F4SD service desk application is becoming even more flexible. This multi-tool for the service desk helps companies’ first-level support teams analyze, resolve, and manage common IT incidents. In the application’s clearly organized dashboard, all relevant data is evaluated, logged, and displayed in aggregate form. The latest update now also allows users to create their own scripts for collecting custom metrics—for even greater flexibility in the application.
Waldbronn, June 6, 2023: Consulting4IT continues to develop F4SD – This time, the team focused on enabling users to integrate their own PowerShell-based scripts into the application for regularly scheduled data collection. The benefit: F4SD becomes more adaptive and thus significantly more adaptable to companies’ individual help desk applications and processes.
Information gathering according to your own specifications
With its “Custom Measures,” F4SD now expands the range of monitoring options available through the F4SD Agent. So if IT support needs to retrieve specific metrics—such as those from registry entries or WMI parameters—due to existing issues, a corresponding PowerShell script can now be written and embedded in F4SD. For display in the F4SD Cockpit, specific parameters are additionally specified, including the frequency of automated value queries by the agent as well as the frequency and type of output to the Cockpit. Finally, the threshold values for evaluating the data can be stored directly in the Cockpit. In addition to the scripts for standard values predefined by the manufacturer at delivery, the new feature allows additional values to be determined and displayed in a historical format in the Cockpit. For this value, IT support can create a corresponding Quick Action—also based on PowerShell—to resolve related issues directly.
Custom scripts for greater efficiency
The key benefits of this enhancement lie primarily in the ability to customize the application to meet your own specific help desk needs. In addition, the feature makes it possible to quickly and easily access specific metrics that would otherwise have to be painstakingly and time-consuming to extract from sources such as registry entries—assuming the support agent even knows what to look for and where to find it when dealing with a particular issue. Once the connection between such a fault scenario and specific values has been established, however, storing the corresponding script in F4SD enables a clear and meaningful display in the Cockpit. And thus the easy identification of a specific fault.
Particularly advantageous: The displayed metrics are context-based and evaluated accordingly. Instead of a single, meaningless value from a jumble of information, the respective first-level support agent immediately receives an overview of whether the value is good or bad. Another advantage is the standardization of the data foundation for first-level support—all support agents can work at the same information level and thus in a consistent manner.
Further Outlook
This update for integrating custom metrics will not be the last. Consulting4IT’s in-house development team is already working on additional features. Among other things, the team plans to develop an F4SD Performance Monitor to measure the improvements achieved.