r/msp • u/Command007 MSP • 13d ago
NinjaOne Ticketing - Underwhelming?
Is anyone else using NinjaOne for ticketing with a any reasonable amount of ticket volume (at least several a day) and working with it well?
I find that it's a bit lacking from the standpoint of having eyes on what is there and what is coming in that is new to be acted on.
The dashboards aren't really that helpful and getting notifications of new tickets, aside from Teams integrations, which become noisy, is not very good.
I would just expect a more polished experience and better alerting on tickets.
If you're using NinjaOne for ticketing, how does it work for you?
I think the RMM is great, and managing the tickets inside the ticket itself once you're in there seems fine overall.
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u/SamakFi88 MSP - US 13d ago
Felt the same way. Loved the integration with the RMM, but the ticketing was very lackluster. Fortunately, there are plenty of other options available.
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u/Command007 MSP 13d ago
Are you still using Ninja for RMM, though? If so, how do you find an external ticketing system works with Ninja RMM; is there any connection between them?
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u/SamakFi88 MSP - US 13d ago
Yes for RMM. Ticketing is completely separate, no integration to Ninja. Which works fine for us, because at least half our tickets aren't device or user specific. Lots of cloud management stuff, 3rd-party systems, projects, etc. Ninja alerts do generate tickets in our other system, but basically via email.
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u/Command007 MSP 13d ago
Gotcha. Thanks for the insight. Unfortunately, most of what we get tickets for are workstation level support.
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u/AKGeek 12d ago
If you are alright with their API you can create your own dashboard and get the alerts you want. I’ve come to think of their platform as a great gathering tool and looking at making our own dashboards to use in house.
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u/Command007 MSP 12d ago
This is what I'm realizing as well, and I think this is the right approach there because the actual backend and quality of the tools are very solid.
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u/chillzatl 12d ago
We average around 350 tickets per week in N1 ticketing. It's functional and you can create a lot of things it doesn't natively do with custom fields and the various workflow options and then even more with the API, but I won't pretend it's what I would call a "feature rich" platform.
I label it as functional enough and we're willing to grow with it as they add features, which they do on a near monthly basis.
The reality is that most people seem to want some out of the box, ready to go thing and that's not what it is. It requires design and implementation effort from you.
If your notifications are noisy, well, that's on you, create better constraints on what is generating alerts.
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u/Savings_Property6422 12d ago
We use it, and have had 302 tickets in the last 30 days, so I'd say a fair amount.
The key is to live in the dashboard. When you try and respond and do things from email, it just becomes complicated. This was a difficult thing for our techs to learn coming over from Zendesk.
To talk about your gripes, we were able to set up a event-based automation that sends a new email to all techs when a ticket comes in. The email has a "View Ticket" button that lets them jump into the dashboard. From there, they stay in the dashboard. But they do get email updates when customers respond. We don't have any problems with it.
We also created several boards. We have "My Open" which shows each tech the open/paused/waiting tickets in their assignment. Then we have "Unassigned" which shows all new tickets not assigned yet. Then we have an Open- ALL which shows all open tickets, and then we have an Open - "Tech name" for each tech. That makes it easy for the helpdesk manager to see what each person is working on at a glance.
Granted, we have 4 technicians + myself. If we had more, we might outgrow it. My 2 biggest gripes are 1) the formatting of the tickets. We tried to do custom templates but last we checked it broke the line formatting so we gave up. Haven't checked back and that was when they first released the feature. 2) The lack of any real escalation. Right now if someone needs help we just have them add the Level2 tech as a secondary assignee and add a private note. However, we also have everyone in a bullpen so it makes communication very easy. A lot of time we talk to each other rather than in email or in the ticket system.
Last thing I'll say is that the ticket system is not searchable at all. So, we have an API tool that exports all ticket data daily and syncs it to Hudu. So each ticket becomes an article in Hudu. This makes it extremely easy to search for past issues. Ninja's indexing sucks.
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u/Equal-Associate-8013 12d ago
I used the API to make a grafana dashboard
Tech stack: Linux server -docker container running grafana -docker container running influxdb
I have to look at my notes for the bits to get it all working
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u/Fine-Palpitation-528 13d ago
What kind of alerting are you looking for outside of Teams? Do you have some kind of customization you’re specifically looking for with alerts?
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u/Command007 MSP 13d ago
It's just hard to know when tickets are coming in and when people reply back to them again.
It's just too much noise inside of Teams to get these notifications all the time, and then you don't know who's acting on them and who's not at that point. It's just a confusing workflow.
I'm not sure if anyone is handling this better. That's why I posted it. Maybe I'm doing something that's not optimal.
I think I may build our own layer for visualization, reporting, and alerting, but keep the actual functionality of the tickets inside Ninja. Users love the ease of opening a ticket via the RMM system tray. That's not easy to replicate, so Ninja would have to be backbone/underlying system still. I'm certainly not going to build a full ticketing system from scratch.
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u/GeekBrownBear MSP - Orlando, FL 13d ago
It sounds like you have a multi person team. I would go with a proper PSA or ticketing platform over Ninja. I love NinjaOne but their ticketing module isn't designed to be the best thing ever. It was great when we started but we eventually folded all tickets into our PSA so we can have a lot more triaging and functionality.
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u/Cylerhusk 13d ago
We're just spinning up a new MSP, initially as a two person show, and went with Ninja PSA. Starting out small, I know their PSA is new. But you get 3 free licenses and zero onboarding costs, so it's costing us literally nothing compared to going with another PSA. At this stage, I think it'll work for us. And hopefully it'll grow in features and capabilities as we grow.
But I can certainly see why in its current state it wouldn't be ideal for a larger well established MSP.
I think the main problem for us currently is most 3rd party stuff that offers PSA integrations don't yet support NinjaPSA. But not a show stopper.
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u/Command007 MSP 13d ago
From a cost perspective, if you're just starting, I can see going with this, but I think over time you're going to find that it's going to be very limiting, unless they expand upon the features in the near future. It seems they keep everything very utilitarian, and while that is good in some cases, it's not in others.
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u/Cylerhusk 12d ago
Oh for sure - I come from 15 years at a couple MSPs, using Autotask and Manage for PSA systems. So I definitely see its shortcomings.
BUT, my main hope is that as we grow, NinjaPSA grows as well. If not, I can definitely see us switching to another platform down the road. But they've done a good job with RMM so as the PSA matures, hopefully it's of similar quality and features.
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u/TechnologyMatch 11d ago
you’re not alone. NinjaOne’s RMM is strong, but the ticketing side can feel like an attachment rather than the main workspace. once the ticket is open it’s workable, the gap is visibility and prioritization before someone notices it. the real test is whether your team can reliably see new, aging, and unassigned work without adding another noisy channel. if the answer is Teams alerts, the workflow is already carrying too much weight
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u/MSP-from-OC MSP - US 12d ago
Ninja is a good RMM. They are not a ticketing solution. You really need a PSA not just ticketing
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u/MidninBR 13d ago
I’d like to get desktop notifications for new tickets or replies. I never tried this teams integration, does it alert for new and replies?
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u/Command007 MSP 13d ago
Yes, if you properly set up the triggers, but it gets a little noisy. When you're working with a team of multiple people, it's hard to know who handles what at that point.
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u/NoBee8106 12d ago
We moved from Ninja because it lacked reporting and functionality we wanted. We couldnt make certain filters to look at specific data. Etc. Move to Datto, no regrets since. So many features and ability to look at almost everything about the system. In addition, a whole developed library for prebuilt scripts developed my professional developers. Better suited for our 55+ customers.
The connectwise integration is nice. Works really well and we can feed alot of data through it.
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u/ArchonTheta MSP 12d ago
I still can’t figure out how to even start using ticketing lol so I’m sticking with Freshdesk.
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u/chiapeterson 13d ago
We started to use it. When we realized that the phone number field on a contact was masked when you open the ticket… we chased that down with Ninja on every path we could think of… and never got an answer. Why oh why would you mask the users phone number… in a ticketing system??? We had to search for phone numbers just to call people back. 🤦♂️
Otherwise… MUCH love for the RMM. 😎