Task management

On this page

Introduction

Service Desk Task assignments are critical in managing the work of your service desk. The task management experience in Service Desk provides a dedicated, scalable task object and task index page designed to give agents, managers, and executives clear visibility into all work associated with incidents, problems, changes, releases, configuration items, and more.

Task management requires a migration of all your existing tasks. For Premier accounts with access to a sandbox, SolarWinds recommends migrating your sandbox first so you can see the new functionality before migrating your production environment. This also provides you the opportunity to create internal documentation for your team before you migrate in production. See Initiate the migration.

Benefits of Task management v2

Dedicated task objects and a task index page allows the following.

Agents/Technicians:

• Can have a single place to see all tasks assigned to them or where they are mentioned/cc’d.

• Can quickly update status and add comments.

Managers/Supervisors:

• Can have a consolidated view of all tasks in their service desk/service provider.

• Can filter by assignee and state and understand task throughput and bottlenecks.

  

Task objects

Each task is its own object with its own details page, similar to an incident detail view. A task can be created from and related to existing objects, such as incidents, problems, changes, releases, configuration Items, purchase orders, and other tasks.

On a task details page, agents can:

• View and change assignee and group assignment.
• Manage due date, title, and description.
• Work across tabs, including:
  • Comments (public comments with notifications to task assignee and cc’d agents)
  • Related (relationships to other objects, for example, incidents and problems)
  • Source details (contextual information pulled from the originating object)

Tasks have a state field in the header, modeled after incident states, with the following values:

• New
• Assigned
• In Progress
• Hold
• Completed

Comments and resolution notes

Comments added on a task details page live on the Comments tab and are scoped to that task.

When a task is completed, a resolution comment and resolution code are captured, mirroring the incident resolution note pattern.

Source details and relationships

A task is automatically attached to a source object, if created from another object, at the time of creation, for example, an incident, problem, or change.

A dedicated source details tab shows relevant fields from the source, so the assignee has necessary context, even if they don’t have direct permission to open the source itself; only fields marked “show on portal” are shown.

Task index page

See Tasks for more information on the Tasks index page.

Tasks in a process / task tabs

When tasks are generated from workflow processes, for example, incident or change process steps, users can:

• See task or approval entries within the process/task tab.
• Click the task title to open the Task details page in a new tab.
• Change the state of the task.
• Change assignee and group assignment.

Showcase video is available

A Task Management v2 video is available to help users understand Task Management v2.

Migration

Task Management v1 is tightly coupled to specific objects and workflows, which makes a migration necessary to ensure past and future tasks work in the same way. You initiate the migration with the click of a button, and all your existing tasks are migrated.

During migration

Your account becomes unavailable during the migration process. The amount of time depends on how many tasks are in your account. The migration process can take up to a couple of hours. While your account is down, incoming emails will be queued, and when the migration is complete, tickets will be created for those emails.

When a migration is initiated, the request is added to a migration queue to ensure platform stability. Too many simultaneous migrations could cause a heavy load on the system, and queuing them avoids that. When your account is added to the queue, it will still be available until it is your account's turn to be migrated. Based on the number of accounts in the queue, it could take a couple of hours for your account to get to the top of the queue so the migration can begin. However, once your migration starts, your account down time will be minimized, although time is still dependent on the number of existing tasks that need to be migrated.

You will receive an email notification when the migration is complete.

In addition, during migration:

• Existing tasks and approvals are moved to the new task object.

• Links from incidents, changes, and other source records are updated so they continue to point to the correct work.

• Task fields such as title, description, assignee, group assignment, due date, and state are added to all existing tasks.

• Permissions are aligned with Service Agent User roles so agents keep visibility into the tasks they should see.

• Task Management v2 introduces a dedicated Task object and Task index so that:

  • Agents/Technicians:

    • Can have a single place to see all tasks assigned to them or where they are mentioned/cc’d.

    • Can quickly update status, add comments, and (in later phases) track time without leaving their flow of work.

    • Permissions are added to all Service Agent User roles. These permissions allow the agents to following:

      • See tasks assigned to them and tasks they created.
      • See tasks where they are @mentioned.
      • See tasks where they are cc’d.
      • See tasks on objects they have permission to view.
  • Managers/Supervisors:
    • Can have a consolidated view of all tasks in their service desk/service provider.

    • Can filter by assignee and state and understand task throughput and bottlenecks.

If your migration fails for any reason, your account is reverted to Task Management v1 and you will receive an email advising you to contact SolarWinds Technical Support.

After migration

Changes you will see after migration are:

• The new Task and Task index page are the default experience for working with tasks.

• All Service Agent User and Service Task User roles have new permissions.

• Reporting supports the same analytics as before the migration (see Task management reports. In addition, the following is added:

  • The number of tasks assigned to each assignee.
  • The number of tasks in each state.

• If a user attempts to access/manage tasks through the mobile app, they'll receive a message that task management is not available. See Important Limitations to Note for Task Management v2.

Initiate the migration

SolarWinds recommends that before migrating, administrators read Important Limitations to Note for Task Management v2.

We also recommend that Premier customers migrate in a sandbox environment before migrating their production environment. This allows you to first interact, learn, and build your own internal documentation before migrating your production environment.

To trigger the migration:

1. Navigate to Setup > Account > Account Summary.

2. Click Explore Task Management on the right side of the page.

3. Follow the instructions in the popup.

4. Confirm understanding of what migration consists of and limitations.

5. Click Migrate Now.

   Reminder: When you click Migrate Now, your migration could start immediately or it could be placed in a queue waiting for the migration to begin. If it is placed in a queue, you will be informed and the downtime for the migration will not start until the migration is activated.

Important Limitations to Note for Task Management v2

There is no support for APIs with Task Management v2. Any API calls built for Task Management v1 will not work post-migration. Support for APIs in Task Management v2 and retroactive support is currently in development with release planned planned for early Q3.

Task Management v2 is not available in the Mobile app. Task Management v2 for the mobile app is in development and will be released with support for APIs.

Task management reports

The reports in the Service Desk Task Management section focus on enhancing your ability to monitor the volume of work performed by you and your team. The data presented in these fields:

• Help discover possible bottlenecks and deficiencies.
• Allow you to take action.
• Measure the impact of the actions taken.

Tasks Throughput report

When analyzing a specific field of interest, you can view how many tasks were:

• Created
• Completed
• Remained open in a specified time frame

This information can be used to answer questions such as:

• What does my agent's performance and output look like, from the tasks workload perspective?
• How many tasks per agent are still open?
• Should the load balancing be re-evaluated?

To maximize the actionable data in these reports, you can filter and group by:

• Source Site
• Source Department
• Assignee's Site
• Assignee's Department
• Source Object

Tasks Volume Breakdown report

To further analyze your data, you can slice and dice your tasks using two fields of interest.

Select from:

• Source Site
• Source Department
• Assignee's Site
• Assignee's Department
• Source Object

This information can be used to answer questions such as:

• What is the open task’s status distribution, per agent?
• Which requester produces the most tasks and what is their task type?

Related topics

• Analytics: Reports
• Tasks