AureaDesk: why we built our own dashboard for TOPdesk

Almost every TOPdesk environment we take over has the same reporting habit: once a month somebody exports to Excel, pastes in some charts and circulates a PDF. Three people open it, at the monthly review it is already two weeks old, and the question "how are we doing right now?" stays unanswered.

That is where AureaDesk came from, not as a product we set out to build, but because we needed it ourselves to account for the administration we do. This article sets out what it is, what it is not, and when it is worth it.

What the problem actually is

TOPdesk has reports. The problem is not that figures are missing, but that they stand apart from one another. The number of open calls says little without the trend. Resolution time says little without knowing which operator group is pulling it up. And a change made last week only turns out to relate to this week's failures once you put the two side by side.

The usual answer is a BI project: Power BI on top, data models built, licences bought. That works, but it is a heavy instrument for making your own service desk legible. And it produces a second system needing maintenance from the same people who were already short of time.

What AureaDesk does

Through the TOPdesk API, AureaDesk reads the modules covered by your package and your TOPdesk licence and presents them in dedicated views, including an Overview that summarises them and a Wallboard with today's figures. Operations Management (from Pro) and Reservations Management are modules you add on; Enterprise includes them. It runs on its own subdomain per client; you sign in with a browser, there is no app and no BI licence.

• Incident Management: intake, SLA compliance per priority, resolution time and the oldest incident still open, with a forecast for the next seven, thirty and ninety days (with Enterprise also six months).
• Change Management: changes and their underlying activities in the same view.
• Operations Management: the work that is neither incident nor change, but still costs capacity.
• Asset Management: per asset the number of incidents and changes, and their order in time.
• Operator License Management: paid operators with no activity in the past ninety days, with their permission groups.
• Workload: the work per operator group and per operator (an administrator can switch off the figures per operator), composed from several modules.

Asset Management, Workload and Operator License Management are in Pro and Enterprise; Pro is included with our management packages.

An export to PDF, Word or PowerPoint keeps the period and filters of the screen. That sounds like a detail, but it means whoever receives the export sees exactly what you saw.

The view that surprises people most

In practice that is Asset Management. Not because of the counts, but because of the chronology: per asset you see incidents and changes in order of time. That makes it visible whether failures appeared shortly after a change. Everyone suspects that link occasionally; checking it used to cost an afternoon of exporting.

What it is not

It does not replace TOPdesk reports. For a specific, one-off question a report inside TOPdesk is often quicker. AureaDesk is for the questions that come back every month.

It is not a BI platform. You cannot build your own data model in it or connect external sources. That is a deliberate limit: if you can, you are back in the project you were trying to avoid.

It does not fix poor registration. If calls have sat in the wrong category for years, a dashboard shows that neatly, and nothing more. Often that is the first return, mind you: you finally see how far off it is.

When it pays off

The sum is simple. If producing your monthly report costs two to four hours, that is easily thirty hours a year. Add the time spent on one-off questions: how many calls did department X have last quarter, what was the resolution time for team Y.

So it pays off sooner at organisations where somebody actually produces that reporting than at organisations where nobody asks for it. In the second case the honest answer is that you are better off deciding first what you want to steer on, and only then switching a dashboard on.

How it fits with us

Every one of our administration packages includes the AureaDesk Pro package; the prices are on aureadesk.com. That is not a sweetener: we use it ourselves for the monthly report, and under Fully Managed also for SLA reporting, with customer satisfaction from TOPdesk. Without a dashboard that reporting becomes manual work, and hours go into something that could have been automatic.

If you do not take administration from us, AureaDesk is available separately. At aureadesk.com you will find the packages with current pricing, the views with screenshots, and you can request a demo free of charge: access to the demo environment with sample data, without connecting anything.