How Zendesk + Oomnitza Improves Employee Experience and Asset Management

The two core pieces of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management are enterprise technology management (ETM) and help desk ticketing and workflow management. In many organizations, the two systems are normally siloed, or at best partially linked. This leads to inefficient processing of help desk tickets, lack of visibility by either employees or IT teams on asset status while it is in the queue for repairs, and challenges in managing upgrade, refresh and other standard scheduled IT interactions.

The lack of strong integrations becomes more of a problem with help desk and IT support moving to fully virtual due to the prevalence of work-from-anywhere. While some integrated solutions exist, they tend to be expensive, brittle and require considerable development resources to configure and maintain. In particular, these legacy integrated solutions struggle to provide the flexibility and agility required for modern IT that has many more asset classes — software, hardware, network and server, IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, connected devices, and smart peripherals. This new reality of constantly changing and evolving IT means that IT teams need the ability to easily add new data sources and create flexible tagging and addition of new asset classes aligned tightly with help desk and ticketing software to deliver a seamless Digital Employee Experience.

In terms of help desk and ticketing software, legacy solutions that come out of the installed software world have many pre-existing capabilities but inferior user experience and a significant lack of flexibility to design bespoke workflows. This results in a DEX for employees and IT teams that slows down the pace of work and feels dated. In short, the best combination of ETM and help desk/ticketing requires agility, flexibility, and ease-of-use that translates into a better employee experience while improving productivity and enabling automated workflows. In this regard, an integrated solution of Oomnitza and ZenDesk delivers on the promise of a modern holistic solution.

The combined solution delivers integrated, flexible, extensible, and easy-to-automate cloud-based ITAM and help desk capability that breaks down silos and enables the creation of more efficient workflows, reporting, and transparency required to deliver IT service excellence. You can integrate the two solutions in minutes to manage laptops, mobile devices, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, smart peripherals (monitors) and much more. Oomnitza and Zendesk both enable mobile management of ticketing and asset status, allowing for IT service from anywhere. Best of all, enabling the two does not require any dedicated engineering time or additional coding; setting up a simple link from the Zendesk API into Oomnitza delivers the full functionality and enables all the capabilities of integration.

How Oomnitza Addresses Dynamic IT Challenges

Oomnitza is an Enterprise Technology Management solution that provides a holistic view of all IT assets in a single system and empowers IT and security teams to manage the full lifecycle of assets and devices across all classes from a single integrated view. Oomnitza enables two-way data flows between siloed solutions, creating a unified view of the entire IT portfolio in a single, accurate database. An agentless solution with a REST API and extensible Python-based connector architecture, Oomnitza is pre-configured to connect directly with the Zendesk API. Oomnitza acquires, cleans and reconciles data and empowers IT and security teams to create detailed, multi-step automated workflows and playbooks to execute in conjunction with Zendesk help desk and ticketing workflows.

Oomnitza provides bi-directional data flows that allows Zendesk users to tag and update assets and status in the Zendesk UX or in the Oomnitza dashboard, making it easier to manage processes without forcing changes in workflows. This also allows IT admins to gain a holistic view of users, business units, geographic locations and functions across all asset types (mobile, Cloud, physical) and across SaaS, IaaS, DaaS and other modalities. For teams using Zendesk, the integration empowers better reporting, faster time-to-resolution, enhanced ticket status and asset status transparency for employees and the IT desk.

Oomnitza and Zendesk Integration Benefits

Working together, Zendesk and Oomnitza can provide granular ticketing, support and workflow automation for every stage of asset lifecycle from purchase to commissioning and imaging, to assignment and deployment, to updates and refresh, to retirement or reassignment. Oomnitza provides higher-level dashboards and enables integration of Zendesk with other normally siloed but crucial systems related to endpoint management including HR, SIEM, SSO, ticketing, and support.

Potential capabilities enabled by the Zendesk-Oomnitza integration include:

Link Devices and IT Asset Records to Tickets: Display all devices linked to a support ticket based on any set of custom attributes such as status, business unit, geography and more.
Show All Devices Owned By A Requester: Display all the devices that belong to the ticket requester in the support ticket. This allows IT support to better understand potential system conflicts and dependencies, or to intervene on existing IT issues around security and compliance in a less intrusive manner.
Add Assets to Employee With Flexible Tagging: The integration allows IT team members to tag additional assets to any employee via their support tickets using the Zendesk ticket commenting feature. This data is then transmitted back into the Oomnitza ETM, updating records and providing better, more accurate data for compliance, auditing, procurement and other IT processes.
Pull Up Asset Ticketing and Support Record in Oomnitza: Use Oomnitza to pull up an asset record and view the history of Zendesk tickets. This allows IT desk employees to quickly see the entire history of an asset and make a better decision on refreshing or replacing the asset given its past performance or circumstances (if an asset was dropped or suffered another catastrophic event).
Configure Asset Management Fields That Matter: The flexible data structure of Oomnitza simplifies configuring asset management fields, enabling drag-and-drop customization to create the dashboards IT teams want and to display the attributes that matter the most to an organization, business unit, geographic or employee role.
Automate Tracking of Hardware, Software, and Cloud Asset Attributes: Oomnitza automatically pulls in key attributes and status from all software, hardware and cloud assets using agentless discovery and aggregation. By automating the tracking of assets and their status, Oomnitza can also push this information directly into any Zendesk ticket created for an asset, saving time on manual entry and improving accuracy and decision making.

Any workflow or process that involves support tickets and asset management data can benefit from this integration. In addition, Oomnitza integrates with over 80 different management systems including ITAM, SAM, MDM, CMDB, ERP, HRIS, Finance, Security, SSO, Employee Directory, IaaS, Paas, SaaS, and more. These integrations allow for creation of multi-step workflows that require a series of actions including the creation of a support ticket such as when an activity on a device triggers anomaly warnings, when a device remains offline for extended periods, when a piece of cloud infrastructure shows strange usage patterns and.or when a support ticket has been open for an extended period.

Demonstrated benefits of the integration include:

Faster mean-time-to-remediate vulnerabilities and 0-days
Reduced time spent by IT and security teams on patch management and endpoint hardening
Reduced complexity of managing software updates and patching
Faster repatriation of software and hardware and reduced resulting costs

Easy creation of workflows spanning multiple systems and organizational silos for alerting, anomaly detection and remediation
More accurate asset information due to two-way data integration between Zendesk and Oomnitza
Better utilization of ticketing for a wider range of requirements due to integrations between Oomnitza, Zendesk and other systems

In an era when businesses everywhere are going more and more digital, ticketing platforms and ETMs must cooperate closely to deliver the level of service demanded by employees, and to ensure the accuracy and reliability of asset data needed for higher compliance and security standards. Oomnitza and Zendesk simplify this process with fast integration, drag-and-drop configuration, and two-way data sharing — collectively enhancing the value of both platforms and improving employee experience, security, compliance and optimization of IT asset utilization.