Assess the Asset with ServiceDesk Plus Custom Scripts

19 June 2015
by Nigel Arnold

Had an interesting discussion with a client that other day. They were looking to improve the efficiency of the first interaction on a request for a technician in diagnosing potential user issues. One method they perform is a basic connectivity check to the users workstation to eliminate the obvious fault and they wondered if it might be possible to provide this an a button in the GUI for technicians to select.

Given ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus has recently introduced custom menu options I thought this might well be feasible.

To configure a custom menu option on the Actions menu of a request we need to navigate to Admin > Request Custom Menu:

For simplicity I decided to stick with an Action Type of a simple batch file for now but you can also run class script if necessary:

You’ll notice that I was able to pass the details of the asset associated with the request using the $ASSET parameter. You could of course pass pretty much any of the parameters of the request in this fashion e.g. $SUBJECT, $PRIORITY. The full instruction I used is as follows:

cmd /c connection_test.bat $ASSET

The other aspect when configuring a Request Custom Menu item is that you can also choose when to display the action based on Role and template. When you view a request the menu item appears in the Action menu:

Next it was a case of creating and saving a batch file to perform a basic ping connectivity test on the ServiceDesk Plus server in the

integrationcustom_scripts folder.

This is the batch file code I used:

@echo off

if “%1″==”” goto NoAsset

%SystemRoot%system32ping.exe -n 3 %1 >nul

if errorlevel 1 goto ConnectionFail

echo ** TEST OK ** – %1 is available and responding.

goto :EOF

:ConnectionFail

echo xx TEST FAIL xx – %1 is not responding to connection test.

goto :EOF

:NoAsset

echo No asset assigned to request.

goto :EOF

So when you choose the Connection Test menu option from the Actions menu of a request you see the connection test result of the test as a pop-up message:

In this case the request had an an associated asset and a successful connection test. However, you notice from the batch file code I also check for a connection fail and also if an asset has not been associated to the request.

Please note that if a user has only a single asset associated to them in ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, such as a workstation, this asset is automatically logged against any request raised against their name:

This is a work in progress so please use with caution. Going forward I might look to see if I could perhaps automatically update the request automatically with a note when the action is run with the details of the result using an API call.

Enjoy!

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