Halo Implementation Series – Ticket Rules – Video 6

hey everyone and welcome again to another installment in the Halo implementation series again with me today um I have my my favorite person from Halo I have Mr Halo himself Morgan espinal um and I know he loves it when I when I call him that and and that's going to be the name I'm going to call him throughout this entire series um and today we're going to talk about about ticket rules and kind of how to use them where to set them up what they for all of those kind of things um and uh you know and Morgan's gonna kind of explain all of that kind of stuff to us so um once again Morgan thank you very much and welcome um really appreciate you being here yeah thank you for having me Chris always a pleasure um yeah I'm liking this Mr Halo more by the by the session and scratch your head from here because you've got such a big head from that right so yeah yeah that's it yeah yeah I'm gonna start introducing myself as that scene yeah yeah absolutely so um yes if you want to talk about um you know ticket rules kind of how they work and also maybe if you could touch on a little bit and I know I've had this question a couple of times is you know what is the difference between ticket rules and ticket workflows you know especially those people coming in from other PSA tools where you know things are called workflow rules so they they kind of are the same thing but it might be worth you just mentioning what those subtle differences are between the two as well absolutely yeah um I mean ticket rules are an incredibly powerful means of uh automating some of the the changes to information on tickets so I guess I'll start off by answering that last question of in Halo PSA what is the difference between a ticket Rule and a ticket workflow um and I suppose the you could treat it as I mean in sort of in um just discussing it objectively a workflow in Halo is primarily intended to manipulate the available actions that are present on a ticket at a given time now that differs from ticket rules in that ticket rules are intended to Simply update the information on a ticket based on some criteria that has been met so it's going to be your ticket workflows that that really drive the ticket forward we saw it in our workflow session that it's the workflows that sort of if once configured correctly allow us to perform the actions that will eventually take us to ticket resolution um today we'll see how the how ticket rules uh simply update the fields on a ticket so um yeah you can configure your ticket rules to to manipulate the information on it on a ticket by which uh I I might be talking about updating the uh the SLA on on a ticket or priority on a ticket or reassigning that ticket um but the the available actions are not going to be manipulated that's going to be driven by the workflow that the ticket has against it yeah so so in other words I guess if you had a um you know some kind of custom field on a ticket that said um you know whatever it says change the um or like like we've we've sort of seen before in the in the demo around you know the severity and and the impact that can then say well based on the severity and impact we're now going to change the the priority to medium or something to that effect um and that's that's what a rule is going to do rather than a workflow will kind of oh sorry I hear I go mentioning webflow rules rather than a workflow um kind of yeah moving the ticket to the next stage if you like or the next um you know through to the next action and that kind of stuff yeah exactly um you know touching that example uh based on the impact urgency combination we have a series of ticket rules that change the SLA priority however that's not going to affect what can be done on the ticket we're still going to have the same buttons at the top um and we're still going to be following the same process so yeah let's let's jump in and take a look in a bit more detail so as with all of the or pretty much all of the changes that we make in Halo um we're going to want to go into our configuration module and as we're talking about ticket rules we're going to go on sorry we're going to want to go into tickets and then into rules and you should see um when you spin your trial up that you have a series of ticket rules already configured in the system um and across these nine rules we've sort of established an impact urgency Matrix whereby a particular combination of impact and urgency when selected is going to define the SLA priority at that point so let's take a look at the first rule um and just to explain sort of how how that's been composed I mean these ticket rules are fairly straightforward there's two main components to them there's a criteria so an input and then as an outcome the output where if the criteria is met then the ticket is changed based on what we set our outcome to be so in in our Priority One high impact High urgency example we can see that the criteria is saying that if the impact is equal to company-wide and the urgency is equal to high then change our priority on the ticket to critical and in terms of sort of creating these that's pretty much all there is to consider um some of the some of the noteworthy points firstly um all of the criteria in here must be matched so if you if you find that you have um conflicting criteria in this table then your ticket rule is never going to be applied and so just watch out for that so if these are going to be um and and that brings up a good point so these are ends in here so it has to obviously meet all of that criteria if you wanted to you wanted to have maybe different um you know different things that you didn't want to do to send this then you would you do the includes okay yeah exactly yeah so each row in that criteria tables are and statements um but if you if you wanted some sort of uh if you wanted some ore condition in here you'll see we have rule types of includes so we did have our criteria of equal impact must be company-wide however if I wanted it to be company-wide or multiple users then I could do impact includes company-wide multiple users so that's how you would want to compose something like that and another important point is our precedence so Halo will check through the uh the ticket rules in the system in order of pref Precedence and and we'll see below that we have this stop matching where stop matching other rules when this is matched so for example if we had an extra rule in here um that could potentially be matched however our P our Priority One rule at the top has been matched then based on this checkbox um that no other rules would even be looked up in the list so personally um I like turning this off because the chances are over time you're going to be creating rules that would manipulate different parts of the ticket different information on a ticket so which point you might actually want multiple rules to be matched at any one time so that would never be the case if if this was if this option was enabled so keep an eye out for that and just above that as well we also have this use so we can specify when we want our rule to be matched so we only looking for this raw to be matched when the ticket is initially being logged do we want to only match it once the ticket has been logged and the information is updated thereafter do we want a combination of both or do we want a um our ticket role to be matched manually so put that back to New and existing and and then another point in here for our ticket rules uh is this uh display notification and this display notification establishes the small pop-up that you might see whenever whenever a rule has been matched for example um our priority here is low but if I change my impact to company wide and my urgency to high will see that that rule and that we were just looking at has been matched and based on the fact that I had that display a pop-up present and we can actually visually see that that rule has been matched okay and that's a nice that's actually a nice feature to have because it just kind of is giving you the ability to I should say to see that actually something is Something's Happened something's actually because you might be looking at this thinking why is that changed to critical when I change these it's giving you the ability to kind of say Something's Happened and something's made that that change happen absolutely um what I always say even if people do find this annoying um I always say leave it on initially just while you're familiarizing yourself with the system you're going to want to know when these rules have been matched um similarly you're going to want to know if they haven't been matched right and if there's some conflicting criteria or if some other rule has been matched first you're going to want a clear definition of the rules being matched or not being matched because otherwise like you say you might find ticket information changing you're not going to know why however once you become more familiar with Halo and once you know what's going on and you're comfortable with understanding ticket rules in general and why these fields would change at that point you might want to consider turning it off um but yeah certainly leave that option enabled um for the for the short term for the immediate future okay um and yeah that's that's all there is to ticket rules and there's sort of no no real place to uh sort of set them specifically you have your general list of rules in config tickets rules uh Halo will look through the list uh match on what it matches on based on the criteria stop matching if that is marked as yes and then based on the criteria if matched we're going to be changing our outcome on the ticket and again there's not a huge list of different fields that can be manipulated in here um so yeah that's that's really all there is to them and I think obviously it goes without Sammy you know you you obviously don't have to use ticket rules you can you know you can elect to change all of those those fields manually if you wanted to um you know but but ticket rules are good in this in in this instance as you say that says you know if if these bunch of things happen then then change this and and you know and again um for those people that are coming in from other PSA tools um you know the workflow rules do exactly the same kind of thing it kind of you know looks for a condition and says well if this condition happens then then update the the ticket or whatever it is that you're updating based on that and that's where the rules side of of things come in so um yeah so you know it goes without saying you don't have to use rules if you don't want to um but it is good if you've got this kind of scenario where you change one field and it updates another build within the system um that gives you um you know a really good um a good reason to use these and and you know a good reason why I always recommend people kind of use this just it automates a lot of the system without you having to to manually go and make those decisions and change things based on on um you know something happening that's that's exactly it I'd probably say they're not quite as important as your workflows um you know without a proper workflow in place things can get real messy real quick in terms of every action in the system being present on a ticket at all times so workflows uh ticket workflows in Halo are yeah more more important to get your head around um but these these ticket rules I think are as simple yet effective way of automating a lot of the you know silly little uh drop downs that need to be changed right you're gonna you want to make sure that the information on your tickets is accurate but you don't necessarily want to to be changing them all the time if you know that one field uh the selection of one field is dependent on others the the impact urgency being a prime example here if you if you know that you're going to be implementing an impact urgency Matrix and you know you want your priority to be based on a combination of impacted urgency you don't want to have to set impact urgency and priority every single time you want to create rules in the background to automate the changing of those options so yeah yeah exactly I mean I think um you know so I think it is one of those things that um it's it's a really good part of the system to to use to automate a lot of that stuff um and it's it's probably something that a lot of people may not necessarily use you know unless they've got maybe this kind of thing this this high impact High agency thing but if there is you know any kind of thing that you need to automate on the system then yeah then ticket rules do a really good job of that so um good that's really nice nice and short and sweet um and if anyone has any questions um you know put put a comment below um you know I I can get back to you and show you how to do this in more detail or you know um you know if you want I can put you in touch with Morgan or somebody at Halo that can kind of you know help in more details with the stuff so once again Morgan really appreciate it and thank you so much for your your time and your insights on on helping us get the system set up yeah thank you very much Chris and we'll see you on the next video take care