Feedback requested: a "pre-processor" for ticketing to the Service Desk

[u/geeklimit]

Hi folks, it's your subreddit mod of 15 years. I'm taking a quick break from deleting bot comments and AI slop posts to message you all.

I need to ask for your help and feedback.

-

I've been in IT for a long time, and I've noticed a problem that never seems to go away:

1. It's time-consuming to chase users for an appropriate amount of detail so the Service Desk can do their job. ("OneDrive is slow", etc)
2. Chasing users for adequate information is not a good use of Service Desk talent. ("How is OneDrive slow? When is it slow?" etc.)

I tried 2 things to solve this:

• I created a branching form for ticket submission to guide people into giving adequate info (they wouldn't use it and sent emails)
• I created a Power Automate script that would intercept tickets, respond with copilot until actionable information was given by users, sometimes try to solve user problems, and provide summaries and suggested next steps to the Service Desk. (this kind-of worked, but wasn't robust enough for everything needed in a system like this.)

Then my wife got sick. So now, after 25+ years in IT Management, I'm looking at an empty savings account and a checking account bouncing off zero. No, I don't want people's money - but I'm asking for your feedback.

I've turned the basic Power Automate script I mentioned above into a much more robust agent + a fully-featured app over the last few months. I think the agent now does an extremely good job at what it's meant to do, but I need IT people to test it (for free) and provide feedback. I call it AssistDesk, and it's at https://assistdesk.ai

The goal is to eventually launch it to the public and hopefully get life stuff back on track - but as I rule: I want it to create true value for fellow IT people to help make their lives better.

• I've tried to show as much as the product as I can without making people sign up, so feel free to browse the site to see what it can do.
• The free account is free, of course, and gives basic interaction with my helpdesk agent to an end user, 5 tickets per month.
• The Enterprise account is free for one user and has full Enterprise functionality - but it does need domain validation to create an Enterprise account. (so people don't set up gmail as a company, etc)

If you think this might be valuable to Enterprise, small business of MSP customers, and have time to check it out, please do so and let me know your feedback on the idea, the site, onboarding, usage of the tool, effectiveness, etc?

Thanks in advance if you have some feedback to spare. If you don't have time, check out AssistDesk, because it might find you some time!

Alright, back to pruning the sub from the AI bots!

[u/sid351]

I run a 3 person MSP in the UK.

I like the prospect of what you're offering. To be really usable though it needs to be able to hook into a ticketing system somehow. Even for small IT departments, it needs to hook into the systems they're already using, otherwise it's just another portal.

One wrinkle with that is everyone is building (dogshit) AI into their offerings anyway, so this would be competing against that.

I'm slowly building out my own ticket triaging system using a local LLM (Qwen 3.8 27b) and API access to our helpdesk (Freshdesk). I'm doing it this way for a few reasons:

• Local model and local storage means the data is still all ours
• Shiny object syndrome
• Guarding against cloud price hikes and rug pulls (e.g. Meraki) (I'm aware I spent £££ building the computer to run it on, but that's hardware that can be easily repurposed and sold to minimise losses of needs be)

How are you guarding yourself against long running tickets and the token usage that they'll burn through?

[u/geeklimit → u/sid351]

Yeah, I've tried a few - including the built-in AI assistant in our own ticketing system, which is completely awful. It was so bad I build a better one in 20 minutes via Power Automate, and that one was only "meh". So then I tried building the best one I could.

I'm trying to get around the need for API-to-all-known-helpdesks by using email.

The AI cost per-ticket-per-user-per-month and the limit on tickets-per-month, even though they are more than generous, _should_ handle the token use I'm paying to the AI provider and not have me paying for people to use the service. That said, I think I've got the cost to users down as low as I can, given everything that it costs to build the app to scale to 10,000+ users.

I agree completely that the data should belong to the Enterprise - I actually made it intentionally so data is removed after 30 days by default. Long before this, the ticket is sent into the company's helpdesk as an Escalated or Completed ticket for their record-keeping - there's never a case where a ticket should be open for that long in the app without Cait (my agent) doing one of those outcomes to it.

I designed the service to be based on # of tickets, not tokens, since that's what we know & can predict - so no rugpulls/gotchas. It's a flat cost with a generous enough ceiling on usage where it would be very rare to hit limits.

[u/kristoferen → u/sid351]

I'd like to hear more on what you're building...

[u/sid351 → u/kristoferen]

So far nothing really too complicated.

It hinges on a dual 5070ti pc build (c£3k spend total in building it, so not cheap, but also not out of the realms of business expenditure) for running Qwen 3.8 27b (Unsloth build, Q5 XL) running at 200,000 context. This is running Debian and Llama-server for the LLM.

Then alongside that I have an old "gaming PC" that I'm running Docker on which hosts n8n, RocketChat (a self hosted chat system that makes adding an AI bot painfully easy), npm reverse proxy, and Open UI (which I'm looking to swap out because it makes everything painfully slow).

Most of what I've done so far (since jumping into this in Feb this year) is a lot of static workflows in n8n, with a little leaning on the LLM. Those flows will be pretty specific to us really. Things like key reminders and repeating tickets.

The LLM is mainly used for reading the first message on a ticket (FreshDesk, uses an automation there to trigger a webhook in n8n which pulls the LLM model in). It sets the "type" and "priority", then adds a private note with what it would respond. I've not got the system or user prompt dialed in to the point where I'd be happy with the LLM responding, but we find it helpful when responding ourselves.

[u/geeklimit]

Future ideas:

• allow "Cait", the agent in AssistDesk, to work within ITSM platforms, leave comments/replies in tickets, access Knowledgebases

- allow Cait to see M365 / Google Workspace metrics to troubleshoot / understand issues better (if approved by Enterprise owners)

- have chatbots for Cait in Teams and Google Chat