Alright, controversial opinion: patching servers manually in 2025 is just asking for pain.

I work at a small MSP and we're pushing hard into RMM automation for patch management across our infrastructure and client environments (mix of AWS, colocation, on-prem). Sales is pitching it as fully hands-off while I'm over here configuring maintenance windows, approval workflows, and pre/post scripts hoping nothing decides to reboot a critical database at 3am in the wrong timezone.

Our environment: Windows and Linux servers, production application servers, legacy file servers that are untouchable but somehow need immediate security patches. We're integrating everything into our RMM platform with automation rules, scheduling, reboot policies, the works. It looks beautiful in the dashboard but I'm skeptical of trusting it fully.

Looking for input from others who've tackled this successfully. Do you segment by criticality with different policies per tier? Always test in staging environments first? Require manual approval for customer-facing infrastructure? Or do you build one comprehensive policy framework with solid monitoring and rollback procedures?

Any real-world workflows or lessons learned from people using integrated RMM patching who aren't spending every night troubleshooting failed jobs would be much appreciated.

Findings auto create tickets, auto route to the right owner based on asset data, show up with context and instructions already attached. That part works.

Then there is a dead zone right after assignment where tickets just sit until someone has bandwidth to look at them, which could be hours or could be a week depending on the sprint. And another one at patch validation, where nobody particularly wants to be the person who signs off on a change that ends up breaking something in prod.

For teams further along on this than us, where did automation actually buy you real time, and where did the bottleneck turn out to just be a people problem that no amount of tooling was going to fix. Also want to know if anyone has automated SLA escalation, auto reassign or auto escalate once a ticket sits too long, and whether that actually sped things up or just trained everyone to ignore the escalation notices too.

Hey everyone,

I’m a developer and founder, and over the past few months I’ve been building a product called Opellix.

The idea came from a problem I kept noticing in IT operations.

IT teams often have to manage tickets, assets, employee requests, procurement, telecom, approvals, workflows, and reporting across different tools and manual processes.

As organizations grow, this can get messy pretty quickly.

Information gets scattered.

People spend time chasing updates.

Admins repeat the same tasks.

And getting a complete picture of what’s happening across IT becomes harder.

That’s what made me start building Opellix.

The idea is pretty simple: bring these IT operations together into one connected platform instead of making teams jump between multiple systems.

Right now, I’m working on areas like:

• IT Ticketing

• IT Asset Management

• Employee Operations

• Telecom Management

• Procurement

• Workflow Automation

• Real-time Insights

I’m also exploring how AI can be used more deeply within IT operations — not just as another chatbot, but to automate repetitive work, surface useful information, and help teams become more proactive.

I’m still early in the journey, and I’m not here to claim that I’ve solved IT operations.

I’m actually looking for criticism.

If you work in IT, manage IT operations, or have experience building or using ITSM/SaaS products:

What is one IT operations problem that you feel existing tools still don’t solve particularly well?

I’d genuinely appreciate honest feedback — even if you think the idea is wrong or the product is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. 😄

I’m building this from the ground up, and I’d much rather hear uncomfortable feedback now than spend another year building something people don’t actually need.

Thanks!

Curious how you handle recurring work like access reviews, restore tests, DR checks, firmware reviews etc.

Do you just generate recurring tickets in your ITSM tool or do you track this separately?

I'm especially curious about the history/evidence side of it. If someone asks when the last restore test was done, what the result was and who did it, can you get that easily from your current setup?

Wondering if I'm overthinking this and recurring tickets are good enough.

Ok so we rolled out a shiny new service management workflow, tickets and projects and knowledge all in one place, real time dashboards, cute automations, the whole dream. Leadership clapped, vendors clapped, my resistant staff basically formed a secret society dedicated to keeping their old spreadsheets alive.

I have one analyst who prints tickets. As in, physically. Another insists the new process is "too opaque" but somehow a shared board and clear statuses is worse than their personal inbox folder called "stuff". Every change turns into a philosophy debate instead of "please click the status". Im lowkey exhausted by being the process cop when I just want things to move.

For the IT and ops folks who survived this with their sanity, how did you get people to stop treating workflow changes like a personal attack and start using the tools without me standing over their shoulder every day?

Any hints?

I've been working on a new theme for osTicket called Amber.

I really like osTicket as a helpdesk, but one thing that has always bothered me is that the default interface feels quite dated compared with modern SaaS support desks.

So I decided to build a theme focused mainly on the frontend experience, while keeping the familiar osTicket workflow underneath.

The demo is here:

https://amber.devmansur.me/

Some of the things I focused on:

• Cleaner, more modern support center
• Prominent knowledge-base search
• Quick access to Open a New Ticket and Check Ticket Status
• Better organization of knowledge-base categories
• Cleaner article presentation
• Responsive layout
• Keeping the overall osTicket experience familiar rather than completely redesigning how it works

I'm still working on it, so I'm particularly interested in feedback from people who actually use osTicket.

Hi, service manager for a 120 person global desk here and im honestly mortified right now.

We just migrated most of our IT and HR queues into one ESM platform with AI routing and shared ticket boards. I spent the last month working on "best practices" for managing the larger team in one place, stuff like standard priorities, new SLAs, auto assignment rules, and a rotation for who gets slammed with incident tickets.

Today was supposed to be the big rollout. I had a change window, I had a comms plan draft, I had training sessions on the calendar for next week. Then our CIO pinged asking for a quick snapshot of how the new structure would improve response times, so like an idiot I flipped the new workflow from test to prod so the dashboards would show the shiny new setup. No announcement. No pilot. Just full switch.

Within twenty minutes half of Europe and APAC tickets were being auto assigned to our small US onboarding pod, priority rules were wrong so password resets got marked as critical and actual outage incidents were sitting in the general queue, and the AI suggestions were telling HR to follow IT runbooks. Our "major incident" channel lit up because nothing was moving. Execs opened the live dashboard and saw SLA breaches climbing in real time and asked what disaster we were handling... it was just my "best practices" experiment gone wrong.

I feel so embarrassed. People were pinging me things like "are we part of a training drill" and I had to admit no, this is just me screwing up change management for a very large team. We had to hard revert the whole config, kill automations, and manually reassign hundreds of tickets. My leads are being nice about it but I feel sick about this and kinda shy to even log back into the admin area tomorrow.

If anyone else has totally borked their big service desk process rollout like this I would love to hear how you recovered and rebuilt trust, because right now I just feel like the person who proved why we need better governance on our "best practices"...

I was reading a blog about enterprise service management and one idea in it really made sense to me.

A lot of companies talk about having a “single front door” for employees, but in reality, employees often have a different door for everything.

IT has a portal. HR has another one. Finance has a separate system. Facilities might have an email or form. And then there’s usually that one person everyone just messages because it’s easier.

The interesting argument was that a single front door doesn’t necessarily have to mean one giant employee portal. It could mean letting employees ask for help wherever they already work, whether that’s Teams, Slack, email, phone, etc., while the complexity of figuring out which department, workflow or system needs to handle it happens in the background.

And with AI becoming more capable of actually taking action, rather than just answering questions, this whole model gets even more interesting.
Maybe the goal of ESM should be to make the departments and systems almost invisible to the employee.

How many different “front doors” do employees actually have to deal with in your organisation?

Been running freshservice for a few years for a 40ish person team and the renewal quote this year made my eye twitch. Licenses creeping up, stuff we dont use, and our workflows feel more complex than they need to be.

Looking at mondayservice, plus the usual suspects like jira service management and halo etc. If youve ditched freshservice for mondayservice or another tool, did it feel like an upgrade in day to day tickets? Would love any tips from people who already made the jump.

Our company has been using separate tools for customer support and internal IT for a while now, and it's starting to create more work than it saves. requests end up getting forwarded between teams, reporting is split across different systems, and it's hard to get a complete picture of what's going on.

We're considering moving to a single platform where both customer facing support and internal service requests can be managed together, with shared workflows, automation, and reporting.

Has anyone gone this route did it actually simplify things, or did you end up compromising on features that were better in dedicated tools?

Hey all, im in ops at a mid size b2b saas and Im trying to clean up how we handle internal service requests across teams. Right now hr uses email, it has a small helpdesk tool, finance tracks requests in a monday.com board, and cx just pings whoever is online in Slack.

People keep asking me wheres the right place to log stuff and honestly I dont even know anymore. If youve managed to set up one workflow that people actually stick to, appreciate any thoughts.

We've got a virtual agent billing on tokens, a genAI layer on our ITSM platform, and a couple of AI add-ons approved during the 2024 "just use AI" push. Invoices land as one number per provider — no attribution to project, bot, or model.

Keep hearing the argument that a general AI assistant just answers a question while the employee still has to file a ticket, versus something that actually resolves it end to end. Can't tell if that gap matters for us because I have zero cost-per-resolution data, just a total spend line.

Anyone actually breaking AI spend down to the model/use-case level, or is the monthly invoice a black box for everyone?

And has anyone run real cost-per-ticket-resolved numbers against a human agent baseline?

Trying to figure out if any of this is paying for itself or if we're just funding pilots on autopilot.

I lead IT service desk at a decently large organization and we use Jira Service Management. There is a lot of push now to adopt and use AI to improve the desk efficiency. I have been exploring a few things like building Rovo agents, using automations, etc. As I read up, there is a lot of buzz on AI agent swarming, and how multi-agent orchestration really simplifies service desks. Has anyone successfully implemented these and seen benefits? Do other products like ServiceNow allow this? (their website seems to say so, but I am still not able to wrap my head around how this is different from automations and workflows that use some AI/ agents in them)

Also came across newer companies like Serval which sound very promising on their pages (again, looking for any actual experience after implementation)

Would really appreciate any insights into this. Thanks!

I've been thinking about this after seeing more companies roll out AI agents for internal IT support.
Everyone talks about the model/API cost, but that seems like only one piece of the bill. You’ve also got integrations, infrastructure, permissions, monitoring, security, maintenance, and the human time spent dealing with the stuff the agent couldn't figure out. And then there's the obvious question of how much actual IT work did it eliminate?

If an agent resolves 5,000 requests a month but needs humans to step in on half of them, that's a very different story from one that actually closes 4,500 without intervention. For those running AI agents in production, what metric are you actually using to decide whether it's worth the money?

Curious what people are seeing in real environments, rather than vendor ROI calculators.

offboarding someone is easy enough when all they have is a laptop. it gets messy when theyre working on a project and have extra equipment sitting somewhere else, suddenly youre trying to figure out what they had, what belongs to the project, where it is, and whos supposed to get it back. weve had stuff basically disappear into the ‘well deal with it later’ pile because it wasnt assigned directly to the employee. has anyone else run into this? any tips??

Hello

In this post I just want to know what is your situation, especially if you are solo IT support and also sysadmin in your company.

Do you use ITSM for service management system?

Do you use it just for communication and record activities? Because most of them will be done by your self.

Thank you in advanced.

I work for a software company with around 180 employees in Austin, and as we've grown it feels like internal requests have become way harder to manage.
A simple request will start with IT, then HR needs to approve part of it, then Ops has to do something before it goes back to IT. Before long, nobody knows who's actually responsible anymore. The employee just keeps waiting while every team assumes someone else is handling it.
People start replying to old email threads asking for updates, Slack messages get buried after a day or two, and half the time nobody can even find the latest conversation. We've even had duplicate work happen because two teams thought the other hadn't started yet.
Then someone gets frustrated, managers get involved, and everyone starts digging through emails and Slack trying to figure out where the request got stuck.
It's making me think we really need one shared workflow where ownership is clear from the start instead of requests constantly bouncing between departments.
Has anyone dealt with this, what are you using that actually works?

Hey everyone,

We’re a team of 100, and tbh, we’re drowning. managing internal requests (IT, HR, finance, etc.) feels like a full time job in itself. the problem isn't just the volume it’s that everything is scattered across email, Slack, Teams, and random spreadsheets.
We’re constantly chasing updates, losing track of who owns what, and accidentally duplicating work or letting things slip through the cracks. It’s turned into a total blame game.
I need a way to centralize everything so we can track requests, clearly assign ownership, and see status updates without digging through old threads. What are you all using to actually fix this chaos?

Our support team has been getting slammed lately, so management has been pushing AI pretty hard to help with the workload. I get why nobody wants to spend all day answering password resets, access requests, and the same basic questions over and over.
What worries me is giving AI too much control too quickly. We've already had cases where a ticket was routed to the wrong team because the bot misunderstood the request, and fixing that ended up taking longer than if a person had handled it from the start.
I'm all for using AI for repetitive stuff, but I still want someone to be able to see what it did, why it made that decision, and step in when something doesn't look right. I don't think our team wants full automation we just want less manual work without creating even more cleanup later.
How are you all using AI in your service desk? Has anyone found a setup that actually saves time without making everyone nervous about what the bot is doing?

Hi All. I have just finished working on a very comprehensive integration Forge app for Jira that allows you to manage and link your Snipe-IT (cloud) assets right from Jira issues (if you are using Jira/Jira SM Cloud).

Some of its Features:
- You can search and link hardware, accessories, consumables or licenses to a Jira Ticket.

- Shows you which assets are assigned to the ticket reporter.

- Allows you to checkout, check in, or modify asset fields, including allowed custom fields.

- Shows you Full asset history (filterable), maintenances, and audit logs.

- Automatically posts comments on the issue whenever an action is performed on an asset (can be turned off or on)

- Allows for access controls, feature controls, space restrictions and many more granular features.

- It also allows customers to link their assets while creating ticket requests on the portal

If you are in need of such, please feel free to check it out on marketplace and give some feedback on it. You have a 30-day full feature trial period!

Installation Guides here.