Help center › Use every day
Tickets and SLAs: the basics
Statuses and priorities
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| New | Just arrived; nobody has touched it. |
| Open | A technician is on it. |
| Pending | Waiting on the requester. The shared view Waiting on requester lists these. When the requester replies, the ticket goes back to Open (see below). |
| On hold | Waiting on something else: a part, a vendor, a term break. |
| Resolved | Fixed. The requester is told and can rate it or reopen it by replying. |
| Closed | Done for good. Resolved tickets close on their own after 7 days by default (Admin › Settings › Tickets, 0 turns this off). |
When the requester replies. A reply from the requester, by email, on the portal or in the app, moves a pending ticket back to Open, so it leaves Waiting on requester and is back in the technician's queue; a resolved or closed ticket reopens. An on-hold ticket stays on hold: it waits on a part, a vendor or a term break, not on the requester, and the technician decides when it moves. The technician on the ticket is told the way every reply tells them: "New reply on #42" in the app and by email, and the status change in the app. The ticket's history says "replied, so the status went Pending → Open". The SLA clocks do not pause on Pending, so nothing is recomputed. Admin › Settings › Tickets › A requester's reply reopens a pending ticket turns the move off: the reply and the notification still happen, the status stays, and the technician moves it back to Open when they pick the reply up. Resolved and closed reopen either way. A technician's own reply never moves a pending ticket.
Priorities are Low, Normal, High, Urgent. New tickets get the default priority from Settings unless the category sets its own (Accounts, Wi-Fi and Classroom Technology default to High). Urgent means instruction or safety is blocked for many people now; one of the starter automations notifies the IT Support team and tags it.
Where tickets come from
New Ticket in the top bar (or c anywhere in the app), the portal and email, the mobile app, and the API. A ticket records its source, so reports can tell portal from email.
With AI triage on (Admin › Settings › AI), a new ticket is read against your category tree and teams. When Beacon is at least 70 percent sure and the ticket arrived without a category (a forwarded email, a form with no category), it sets the category, routes the ticket to that category's team and sets the priority itself, and the timeline records the change as "AI triage"; a ticket that came in through a department address keeps its category and team. Below that confidence, the category, priority, one-line summary, matching articles and possible duplicates wait as suggestions, and a technician accepts, edits or ignores each one with one click. Separately, every ticket and reply is screened for signs of crisis (self-harm, threats, abuse, a medical emergency), with AI on or off: a flagged ticket becomes urgent, administrators are notified, and the requester sees crisis resources.
Working the queue
- Views in the sidebar: Inbox (everything open), My Tickets, Unassigned, Overdue (past an SLA target), and under My teams each team you belong to with its open count. If you are on a team, the list starts on your teams' tickets; the Team filter widens it, and Show all teams in Profile & Settings changes the start (see Departments on one desk). Shared views come from Admin › Views; you can save your own from the filter bar.
- Filters: status, priority, assignee, requester, team, site, category, tag, date, and a text search over titles and descriptions. The same filters drive Export to CSV on the Tickets page.
- Shortcuts: c new ticket, g then t tickets, g a assets, g k knowledge, g r reports, ⌘K search anything.
- Reply goes to the requester by email and on the portal; Internal note stays with the team. Attach photos and files to either.
- Saved replies: the speech-bubble button in the reply box inserts one of your saved answers where the cursor is, with the requester's first name, the ticket number and the rest filled in from the ticket (
{{requester.firstName}},{{ticket.number}},{{asset.tag}}and others). Keep a reply to yourself, share it with a team, or, as an admin, with every technician; manage them under Saved Replies in your profile menu, or save the text you are writing with the bookmark button. A saved reply can carry a status, so "Password reset done" goes out as Resolved. - Articles: the book button inserts a link to a published knowledge base article (public articles in a reply, any article in an internal note), and the article is linked to the ticket when you send. The Knowledge section beside the ticket lists the linked articles, links another, and shows the articles AI triage suggested. The requester sees the public ones on their request in the portal, and every article shows how many tickets it has answered.
- Suggest drafts a reply in a chosen tone from the ticket's history; Summarize writes a hand-off summary with next steps; Draft KB Article turns a resolved ticket into an article draft. All three are suggestions you edit.
- Affected: when a ticket is about someone other than the requester (a teacher reporting a student's Chromebook), add that person under Affected beside the ticket, or on New Ticket. Their devices show right there, and one click links the right one to the ticket. They can't see the ticket and get no email from it; All tickets about them lists every ticket that names them.
- Link a device to the ticket and its history is one click away; link the ticket to a site, team and category so routing and reports work.
SLA policies
A policy sets a first response target and a resolution target for each priority, and whether the clock counts only business hours. Each category can name its policy; everything else uses the default. Both are under Admin › SLA Policies and Admin › Categories.
| Priority | Standard (business hours) | Classroom Down (around the clock) |
|---|---|---|
| Urgent | 30 min / 4 h | 15 min / 2 h |
| High | 2 h / 8 h | 30 min / 4 h |
| Normal | 8 h / 24 h | 1 h / 8 h |
| Low | 16 h / 48 h | 4 h / 16 h |
Business hours are Monday to Friday, 7:30 to 16:30 by default, in your organization's time zone (Admin › Settings). Attach Classroom Down to the categories where instruction stops, such as Classroom Technology and Wi-Fi & Network, and leave Standard as the default. A ticket past either target shows in Overdue and is counted as breached in the SLA report; technicians are warned before a target passes.
Automations
Admin › Automations: when a ticket is created, updated, commented on or resolved, or when an SLA target is near or passed, and the ticket matches your conditions (category, site code, priority, words in the title, and so on), assign a person or team, set the priority, status or category, add or remove a tag, add an internal note, notify a person or team, set a field, or call a webhook (a rule's webhook never posts a private team's ticket; the rule still runs). The three starter rules are a good pattern to copy. Test on ticket shows what a rule would do to a real ticket before you turn it on. Automations and AI can never lower the priority of a ticket flagged by the safety screen.