ConnectWise PSA and Exoprise Integration

With the increase in customers utilizing ConnectWise PSA (professional services automation) as their ticketing system, Exoprise has launched a new ConnectWise PSA integration. This integration, available for both Internal IT and Managed Service Providers (MSPs), enables automated ticket creation and resolution for Microsoft 365, cloud, UC and SaaS outage events into ConnectWise. Any network related event can be monitored and raised into ConnectWise in real-time.

As part of the new integration, for MSPs utilizing Exoprise, we added multi-tenant capability that enables MSPs to manage cloud, network, and Unified Communications monitoring from a single portal.

Exoprise PSA Integration Features

Ticket Creation

Our initial focus on the integration is for ticket creation from Exoprise CloudReady and Service Watch alarms. As part of the configuration, ConnectWise users will be able to specify the board, status, type, subtype, and ticket priority.

Once configured, users will be able to specify which network and cloud alarms are sent to ConnectWise, their board, tenant, and respective priorities. This functionality also allows for sending different types of alarms to different Service Boards or as different types and subtypes. As an example, a proactive Microsoft Teams alarm can be configured to go to the board for UC subject-matter experts while having OneDrive alarms go to an alternative board.

Ticket Resolution

With the integration configured and assigned to alarms, tickets will begin being sent over to ConnectWise PSA. When CloudReady synthetic sensors or Service Watch identifies an issue as no longer an issue or resolved, the Exoprise ConnectWise integration will close the ticket automatically with the status configured in the integration.

By allowing the resolution status to be customized, assigning a different status other than “Closed” can be accomplished. Depending on the type of issue triggered by an Exoprise alarm, additional investigation may be warranted before the closure of the ticket.

Embedded Dashboards

Besides just ticket automation through ConnectWise PSA, Exoprise has also enabled embedded dashboards so that ConnectWise MSPs never have to leave their system. MSP users can securely access and monitor their Exoprise dashboards in real-time. Customers and users can access embedded Exoprise dashboards, allowing read access to the CloudReady and Service Watch network and application telemetry. These can also be made available to MSP customers in the customer portal.

Multi-Tenant for MSPs

As part of this initiative, we have added multi-tenant functionality into Exoprise. With MSPs typically having multiple clients, we wanted to provide users the ability to review multiple Exoprise tenants without the need for multiple accounts for each customer using Exoprise.

Once the MSPs Exoprise tenant has been configured for multi-tenant, accessing each of the clients will be available in the Organization dropdown in the top-right corner. By easily navigating between the MSPs client tenants, engineers can access the necessary information for diagnosing issues as they come up.

Integration Use Case Scenarios

Identifying SaaS performance issues, outages, and real-user monitoring is made easy with Exoprise, the ticket creation functionality provided by the integration only improves this. Once integrated, users can create multiple ConnectWise Calls and designate which Exoprise alarms create tickets inside of ConnectWise PSA. This functionality allows Exoprise customers to configure different alarms to create tickets on different boards.

Service Watch Examples

When Service Watch identifies poor Teams performance, a ticket can be created on a Help Desk board for an engineer to troubleshoot the user issue. Once the ticket is created, workflow rules or other ConnectWise integrations could be utilized to notify the affected users that they may have a diminished experience. By communicating this to end users, they can then plan for upcoming meetings accordingly by coming into the office if working from home, using a different meeting software, or even reschedule upcoming calls.

Service Watch Active Test allows for lightweight network sensors to be deployed to Service Watch devices. These configurable active tests include WGet and Ping for verifying access to certain resources, DNS to ensure DNS performance, and VoIP sensors which test for jitter and packet loss between configured sites.

The VoIP active test is excellent for testing VPN performance and typically identifies issues ahead of users reporting them. By having the proactive alarms from the active tests generate tickets in ConnectWise, notifications can be sent to the impacted users prior to starting troubleshooting to avoid ticket spikes.

CloudReady Examples

By configuring different ConnectWise Calls in Exoprise, CloudReady tickets can be configured to create tickets for different alarms on multiple boards or with different types and subtypes. This allows for getting the tickets to the right teams, whether they are the Help Desk, NOC, or App owners. Some example use cases include:

• Exchange Online issues detected by the sensor creates a ticket on the NOC board with an Email or Exchange type or subtype

• Teams Monitoring can detect, end-to-end, whether Microsoft Teams is performing optimally in the network.
• Microsoft 365 Monitoring via Exoprise script free synthetics enable an enterprise to monitor the entire Office 365 suite to know about outages beforehand and recover SLA credits.
• DNS, VoIP, or bandwidth sensors for proactive network visibility to create tickets on the board used by network admins
• SSL Certificate sensor creates tickets 60-30-7 days before expiration for the NOC and higher priorities as the expiration gets closer
• Web login sensor that fails to log in creates a ticket on a board used by the app owner of the tested web app or a specific type

Additional Integration Suggestions

By configuring the integration to also close the created tickets, users can calculate the amount of time between ticket creation and closure for each vendor-specific ticket through ConnectWise reports. In doing so, Exoprise customers can quickly identify vendors not meeting their SLA’s and begin collecting the proof needed for reclaiming SLA credits.

The above-mentioned use cases are just some examples of the capabilities available through the integration. We know that flexibility is important when it comes to PSA integrations to ensure tickets are addressed as quickly as possible.