Freshservice Orchestration center is now 40+ apps stronger
A year ago, we launched the Orchestration center capability in Freshservice. At that time, little did we know that it would turn into a vital driver of customer delight with over 40 apps in just one year! With new third-party applications joining the Apps Marketplace almost every month, we are set to address an expanding range of business needs with an extensible solution that perfectly integrates with the organization’s ecosystem. Let’s take a step back and review the journey of Orchestration Center over the past year.
The genesis of the Orchestration Center
Before delving into what Orchestration Center does, let’s first have a look at a typical day in the life of an IT agent.
Meet Alex, an IT support agent for ACME Corp. He is a troubleshooting expert, and needless to say, everyone loves him. His typical day starts by checking the tickets, responding to urgent queries, diagnosing hardware and software faults, and spending time fixing technical problems.
“I locked myself out of my system. Could you pleeeeeeaase unlock my account?”
“Hey Alex, we have recruited a new HR manager. Can you immediately create an account for her in Azure? Please take this up on priority.”
“I got a blue screen error. Do you have a spare laptop I can use? I have an important customer call in an hour.”
“I can’t access the internet, and my VPN is acting up.”
“I can’t print. Help needed.”
Buzzz, a phone call rings. Hey Alex! This is Susie from the Networking team. “We’re having trouble with one of our VMs. Can you help reprovision the VM, please ?”
Within a minute, Ting! Ting! Tingggg! Alex starts getting an influx of tickets reporting the same issue. CRITICAL SERVICE IS DOWN!
While answering Susie on the phone, Alex remembers that he needs to create a calendar invite and schedule a call with their team members to discuss the items for Change Maintenance.
Pff, with a deep sigh, Alex pulls some hair out while juggling multiple applications to get the tasks done.
Alex’s entire day is teeming with requests for onboarding new employees, fulfilling service requests, setting up system access, managing cloud systems, provisioning user profiles, and much more. In such a setup, exhaustion is obvious. Repetitive and mundane tasks lead to tedium. In all, this leads to inconsistent employee and customer experience.
However, the life of an IT agent doesn’t have to be this way. Alex’s life can become easier with the right tools and processes.
That’s exactly why we built Freshservice Orchestration Center!
Freshservice Orchestration Center powers up agent productivity by automating all repetitive tasks in third-party applications right from the service desk. It enables seamless integration with third-party applications using a zero-code approach.
Let’s see some real-time IT scenarios on how Orchestration Center can empower IT agents, to speed up and automate their day-to-day tasks and eliminate mundane repetitive tasks from their routine.
Maintain effective communication during Major Incident response
How a team reacts to a Major Incident makes all the difference in minimizing the disruptions and bringing services back up and running. As they say, “Time isn’t the main thing, it’s the only thing” it couldn’t be more accurate during these times.
We are seeing how our customers are using Slack, Zoom, MS Teams, Google chat, Webex, Workplace Orchestration apps in an efficient and creative manner to streamline communication during a major incident.
The most common examples are notifying the right team in Slack or Microsoft Teams as soon as a major incident is reported. Zoom app is automatically invoked to create an incident bridge for all the stakeholders to discuss the resolution steps.
Orchestration helps incident response teams to streamline communication during a major incident. The entire process can be expedited by automating the communication processes, leading to faster resolution, increased agent productivity, and an overall reduction in costs to restore the normal IT/business operations.
Automate onboarding and offboarding processes
Onboarding and Offboarding an employee entails many overlapping processes for IT teams. These processes may be coordinated centrally by the HR department and involve multiple other departments, such as IT support, security, operations, and much more.
With Freshservice Orchestration IDP apps like Azure, Onelogin, Okta, Gsuite, MS AD, Jumpcloud, AWS IAM our customers have automated various user and group management tasks like user creation, updation, deletion, and much more leading to an efficient and error-free onboarding process. We are delighted to see how Orchestration apps have helped customers decrease the amount of time it takes to onboard and offboard users right from Freshservice without switching to different applications.
And now, Orchestration center makes it easier than ever to manage offboarding of users and provide a consistent user experience across all services by automating disabling access for employees who leave a company or change roles within the organization in real-time by removing them from Active Directory (AD).
Transform the Employee onboarding and offboarding process into a simple, hassle-free experience for both your employees and IT administrators with the help of the Orchestration center.
Orchestration Apps that can make life easier for you and your Agents
It’s challenging to keep track of all the events on the calendar. After all, we are humans, prone to forgetting things. If you’re the IT administrator who organizes events and invites the team, this one’s for you!
With Google calendar, MS Exchange Orchestration apps automate creating change events in a shared/group calendar. Whenever there is a new change in the service desk, Google calendar, and Microsoft Team Orchestration apps will create the respective event in a shared/group calendar along with the google meet or web links.
However, in pursuit of being productive, we overlook little things that cost us time, such as document submission, evaluation, and approval during employee clearance and referral processes.
DocuSign, Adobesign Orchestration apps enabled admins to automate the employee clearance process. Once the service request is submitted, the clearance form will be sent to all relevant stakeholders involved in the process for their approval and verification.
Google sheets, Smart sheets, Box, Google Drive, and MS One Drive simplify the employee referral process by uploading the referrals attached in the ticket to the respective application along with the employee’s details.
DevOps and Development Management
When there are so many problems to handle, important concerns affecting customers are slipping through the cracks or worse, are overlooked completely. With Jira and Trello Orchestration apps, always stay on top of your issues and bugs. Create new issues or automatically associate existing issues right from Freshservice when a ticket is created.
Developers inevitably have to work with multiple shared user accounts and repositories when companies scale, and hence managing requests to these repositories will be mundane work.
With Orchestration apps like Github and Gitlab, automate requests to repositories and assign the right permissions. Not just that, one can manage users, organizations, repos, branches, and much more right from Freshservice.
Running commands locally on remote computers is a common task many IT admins have to do every day. Powershell Orchestration app lets you trigger Powershell Commands on a remote windows machine from Freshservice and execute SSH commands on an On-premise Linux server/host using the SSH app for Orchestration. The process is simple and effective, and it saves you from having to sneakernet all over the workplace to execute scripts and commands on all of your PCs.
Release management can appear daunting at times, but with the right set of processes, expedite the deployment process and accelerate delivery. Depending on the organization’s size, some tasks can be handled manually, but as the organization grows, the complexity of prioritizing and deploying the items at the right time increases. Orchestration apps like Azure DevOps, Jenkins lets you perform actions on builds, jobs, and work items when a Freshservice Ticket is raised. For example, trigger a job in Jenkins based on a particular condition right from Freshservice.
Cloud Infrastructure
The popularity of ‘Cloud’ based technologies has grown in recent years. By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021. Clearly, “Cloud” is going to be a part of everyday life.
With automation, making changes to your cloud workload tasks becomes a breeze. With AWS EC2, Azure Cloud, AWS Cloud Formation, orch apps automate provisioning VM instances or tech stacks. With AWS S3, automate replicating objects within a dedicated S3 bucket. Automating the provisioning and management of cloud-based infrastructure, free up time and resources for mission-critical action items.
“Make IT run the business, not the applications.”
Excited and happy to see how the Orchestration center is helping IT admins and teams with their day-to-day tasks. At Freshservice, we will continue to add new apps and deepen the capabilities of existing apps to solve new use-cases and ensure customers continue to gain value.
If you’re an automation champion who has turned results with Orchestration and would like to share your story and use-cases with our larger forum, check out our community platform here. Oh, wait! We’ve also collated How-to videos and use-cases catering to different business needs, check them out here.
Ready to make your process more efficient with Orchestration? Explore the list of apps here
Orchestration Center is available across all Freshservice plans, at no extra cost. Furthermore, our support experts can work closely with you to help map out different business workflows with Orchestration Center. To find out more, email us at support@freshservice.com.
