Ivanti has added new Ivanti Assistants to its portfolio of enterprise service management (ESM) solutions to bring endpoint self-healing capabilities to businesses.
The suite of bots, powered by automation, are designed to help service management and helpdesk teams.
They automate detection and remediation of IT issues that impact users and also proactively connect with end users regarding issues that may be unreported or ignored.
Ivanti currently offers four Ivanti Assistants, each focused on one key area of end user IT expertise. The four areas are security and compliance, business continuity, user productivity and resource optimisation.
Each Assistant runs regularly scheduled checks across an organisation's endpoints to determine where end users are experiencing challenges and may require help to solve issues.
Common issues identified by the Assistants include lengthy login times, application errors or lack of required security settings.
The four Assistants also have a library of monitored items within their area of expertise, and customers can add to that library for their business needs.
Once an issue is detected, users can choose to have immediate automated correction, such as switching a firewall back on, or if the issue is not immediately resolvable the Assistant can create an incident ticket in Ivanti Service Manager.
The Assistant can then ask for user engagement, reference learned knowledge, or follow an automated workflow to either achieve a good ESM/IT service management (ITSM) aligned resolution, or, lead to truly proactive problem management.
Ivanti senior product director Ian Aitchison says the Assistants give users increased virtual support and greater speed and efficency to resolve issues that may arise.
He says, “Ivanti Assistants are a new family of cloud-based automation bots that provide endpoint self-healing capabilities and give IT organizations their very own 24/7 virtual support team.
“These powerful, automation bots allow IT service desks to do what was never thought possible before – proactively monitor, identify and automatically fix endpoint issues before users even know they are there.
“Additionally, Assistants also enable IT to proactively reach out to help end users who might not typically contact IT when faced with a service interruption.
"It's a win-win for IT organisations everywhere that struggle to both enable automation and improve the human relationship, while addressing the individual and diverse needs of end users in a timely manner.
The company states a significant benefit of the Assistants is that the detection and ticket creation allow IT service desk staff to now proactively contact end users, and offer to fix the recurring issues that are not typically reported to IT yet still impact productivity and damage the perception of IT.
Aitchison says, “By adding a specialist virtual support team to Ivanti Service Manager, our customers are increasing uptime, reducing unreported IT errors, driving productivity, and, more importantly, improving the positive perception of IT. We're helping end end user frustration over those IT issues that have never really been addressed properly.