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Blog » Getting Started – Configuring Services

Welcome to Beetil, your first big step towards service management without the pain. To get you started, we’ve written a series of Beetil quickstart posts that we hope you’ll find useful.

First things we first, we need to start thinking about what we need to manage. In Beetil we call these services.

A service is anything you want to manage and control. They don’t neccessarily have to be IT related. Examples could be:

an IT service, e.g. email, print services, file server, virus protection etc.
an application, e.g. your HR management system
a project, e.g. the build and implementation of your new fandangled share allocation system
an operation, e.g. your warehouse operations
a process, e.g. your new employee checklist
a comany, e.g. you provide service to a client

Let’s start off with setting up Beetil services.

If you are a service administrator you should be able to access the admin menu near the top right hand corner of your page.

You should then be able to view an existing, or add a new service. We’ll do the latter in this case.

Give Your Service a Name

Not surprisingly, you can give your service a name. You can also give it a brief description and also assign it an avatar to give it a little more personality.

Priority Settings

You can assign a number of priority levels to every service that you set up in Beetil. For each priority (you must have at least five), you can set the following:

Title
Resolution time – this is the target timeframe in which the incident must be resolved
Availability to respond – this defines the hours of coverage for the service, which in turn impacts the resolution time. There are four options to select – 24×7, 9-5 weekdays, 8-8 weekdays and 6-10 weekdays
Escalation Threshold – after the elapsed time has reached x% of the resolution target, service administrators will be notified.

Incident Types

On a per service basis, you can configure a range of incident types. Typically, these would be nature of the incident, as opposed to the category of incident (covered later in incident categories).

Example values you would see in this list are:

Bug
Query
Service Request
Feedback
Feature Request
New User Request
Departing User Request
Data Request

Incident Categories

As well as being able to assign incident types, administrators can permission incident categories. Typically, these would be the “areas affected”.

Populating the incident categories automatically ensures that the incident category drop down appears in the incident entry screen.

If you do not populate this list the incident category option in the incidents screen does not appear.

Incident categories are an excellent way to keep your number of services to a manageable level, assuming that your service levels are generic across these categories.

Service Customer Portal Settings

The boxes that you check allow what types of incidents customers are allowed to log in the customer portal, and what the incident type will be assigned.

In the example below, all four checkboxes have been checked, which means that customers are allowed to report an issue, make a service request, ask a question, or make a suggestion.

Incident Defaults

In order to make incident creation as painless as possible, a series of defaults per service can be configured.

Incident owner – assign which user or group is the default owner of the incident. This can also be the person who creates the incident. If customers log incidents and this is set, the incident will be owned by the first service administrator that Beetil can find.
Incident assignee - assign which user or group is the default assignee of the incident. This can also be the person who creates the incident. If customers log incidents and this is set, the incident will be assigned to the first service administrator that Beetil can find.
Priority
Incident Type

Services and User Permissioning

If you have configured users and/or groups, you will be able to define which of these have access to this service. The following permission levels can be set:

no access – the user does not have any access at all to this service
user – the user has full access to this service
approver – the user has full access to the service AND can approve changes
admin – the user has full access to the service but also: receives escalation emails, and can override incident due dates

In relation to groups, setting a group to be either a user, approver or admin effectively sets the group to be a user. This has no bearing upon users in that group.

More links in our getting started with Beetil series

Remember you can always access the help link in the top right hand corner of most pages! And you can always contact us on email at support@beetil.com, or catch us around the Campfire.

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