r/ITSupport

Had 14 tickets before I even finished my first coffee today and most of them are the same basic stuff. 8 were just password resets for M365 and 3 were people who "forgot" how to map a network drive after the weekend.

It’s not hard work, but it’s just tedious. It takes like 15 or 20 minutes to log into the portal, reset the thing, and then update the ticket. That's nearly half my morning gone on tasks that shouldn't even need a human. I'm trying to write some PowerShell scripts to speed it up but I barely have time to sit down and code between the phone ringing every ten minutes.

I've been looking at stuff like Neo Agent or just hiring a student part-time to sit there and click buttons all day. My lead tech is getting annoyed because he's getting pulled off a server migration to help with "I can't print" calls and it's messing up our project deadlines.

What are you guys using to filter out the noise? Do you just ignore the L1 stuff until the afternoon or is there a way to actually automate these simple tickets without spending weeks setting it up?

I wasn't able to secure a dedicated any cybersecurity internship for the summer. Instead, I got into IT Support for POS systems—mostly hardware/software installation and helpdesk.

I feel like I’m falling behind my peers who landed roles in security or networking. To make the most of the next three months, I want to take some big steps. Any project that I can focus on or should I grind for a certification (like Security+ or CompTIA)? How should I be spending my off-hours to make my security profile become more competitive in my future career ?

NOTE: This is for remote new hire onboarding, not on-site.

This used to drive me crazy when I was in IT support.

New hire shows up on day one. Company email isn't ready. Laptop just arrived. They need credentials to log into anything and every option felt wrong. Personal email. Text message. Slack DM. I did all of them at some point and every single time in the back of my head I knew it wasn't great but there was genuinely nothing better.

I got fed up enough that I just built something to fix it for myself.

You upload a credentials doc, pick something only the recipient would know as the unlock code, and send them a link. They verify who they are, view the file, and it deletes itself right after. If someone intercepts the link they can't do anything with it without the unlock code.

Still early and rough around the edges but it solved my problem. Curious if anyone else has dealt with this the same way or found something better I never knew about.

sendonce.co if anyone wants to poke at it.

 
Hi everyone,

I’ve recently started learning IT support through free resources (mainly YouTube), but I haven’t started hands-on practice yet.

I don’t have any formal experience or certifications right now, but I’m serious about getting into this field and willing to put in the effort to learn properly.

I’m looking for:
Guidance on where to start with practical skills

Beginner-friendly tasks or projects I can practice

Any opportunity for a short remote internship (even unpaid) where I can learn and gain real experience

I’m motivated to learn and improve, just need some direction to get started.

Any advice or help would really mean a lot. Thanks!

I’m 28 and working as a Desktop Support Team Lead in London on £51k. I manage a global team of five and have been passed over for promotion twice now. I’m trying to understand if this is normal or if I’m being held back.

In the last 6 months I’ve taken on a lot more responsibility: automated access workflows, a JSON‑based RBAC system with a small web UI, AI ticket triage, lifecycle management improvements, helping with audits, moving us from Dell to Surface, and proposing a meeting‑room tech refresh.

Reason given twice is that a single member of my team wasn’t performing but not bad enough for a PIP and this is why I didn’t get promoted twice in 2 years. They questions my management style, yet my latest new hire my boss said not to hire as they can’t do the role and they are now out performing everyone else.

For those in IT management: does this seem like a reasonable blocker, or should I be pushing back on this?

Note: Been team lead for 3 years and at the company 7 years

Data analyst here, not sure if this is right place to ask but I was given task to find out how much total tickets is consider Healthy, moderate or poor based on other companies in industry. We usually just report the performance of our IT services towards internal staff with (total tickets-breached ticket)/total tickets and observed if they break SLA or not. Now managements wants to know wether total tickets example 12000 tickets is consider healthy/normal/poor/critical ect.

I’m trying to automate a workflow for a property maintenance company and could use some advice from people experienced with n8n/Power Automate.
Current workflow:

- Work orders come into Outlook emails
- Some details are in the email body
- Some are inside attached PDFs
- We need the data automatically entered into an - - - - Excel sheet used for scheduling
- The company already heavily relies on Excel, so switching databases right now isn’t ideal

We’ve been trying:
Outlook → AI Parsing → Excel

But we’re running into issues like:
- inconsistent email formats
- PDF extraction problems
- Excel append failures
- table/column mapping issues
- Outlook body content sometimes getting truncated

Questions:

1. What’s the most reliable way to automate Outlook → Excel workflows for real-world messy emails?
2. Is n8n or Power Automate better for this use case?
3. How do you handle PDFs attached to Outlook emails?
4. Is using AI extraction (OpenAI/Claude) the best approach, or is there a more stable method?
5. Should we continue using Excel Online tables or move to something else long term?
6. Has anyone built something similar for work orders/service businesses?

Would appreciate any architecture suggestions, best practices, or lessons learned.

So upper management comes in last month all excited about this 98% automated AI triage thing. intelligent agents that categorize prioritize and route tickets instantly based on intent and urgency. sounds great on paper right no more manual gatekeeper role just pure efficiency. i was like sure lets give it a shot anything to cut down on the endless password reset spam.

week one tickets drop 70 percent. team high fives all around. week two we notice the pattern. ai is ruthlessly triaging everything to self service or closing low prio stuff outright. users freak because their emergency wifi issue gets auto closed as known problem with a link to reboot instructions. meanwhile real fires like prod outages sit in limbo because ai deems them medium based on keywords.

now half our day is undoing ai mistakes. false positives on urgency routing critical crm bugs to tier 1 bots that just spit back generic kb articles. tier 1 agents twiddling thumbs because ai swallowed all the simple stuff but left them the edge cases they arent trained for. and the best part the 2% that needs humans, thats all the weird shit that breaks slas because no one touches it for days.

eliminating the gatekeeper sounded smart until you realize ai makes payroll decisions too apparently. my queue is ai rejects and escalations from pissed off users who hate talking to bots. feels like we traded a human bottleneck for a silicon one that lies about priorities.

anyone running 98% ai triage without wanting to unplug it all?

To start, here are my pc components:

GPU - sapphire pulse 9070xt nitro+

CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor

Ram - Corsair Vengeance RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory

SSD - Samsung 990 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive

MOBO - MSI B650 GAMING PLUS WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard

Power Supply - Cooler Master MWE Gold 850 - V2 850 W 80+

So, I recently acquired my new graphics card because I wanted to upgrade a bit. I got it and installed it with new drivers and would regularly get crashes in ARC Raiders with Device Removed and Device Hung errors. I tried reinstalling drivers and that didnt work so I got a new CPU(now the current one) in hopes that it might be my CPU causing issues. I still get these errors and it occurs on more than one game now. Sometimes it just causes my game to crash and I have to restart it and other times it completely freezes and black screens my PC until I restart my whole PC.

I realize I am probably not the most tech savvy person, so that is why I am asking for help. I have tried everything I can think to do from what I can find on the internet, but nothing is working for me. I have also seen people mentioning that maybe this could be an RMA for my GPU? I am just unsure of what my next steps should be.

Take pity on me, I am sure there is more information I am leaving out, so just ask and I will do my best to supply it. Any help is greatly appreciated.

https://preview.redd.it/039yoojx4s0h1.png?width=752&format=png&auto=webp&s=d915f957cd388666e3bf0b6146950dc4b67cff3b

Wondering if anyone has experience with the M2-Sata expansion cards like those in the link?
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007182349627.html

https://preview.redd.it/sgw4p3yqyp0h1.png?width=454&format=png&auto=webp&s=1ef74047db78018554bad132c849ddddd3aefe7c

I have one that i was intending on using with a Intel NUC (nuc6i5syh), as a HomeLab/NAS. The expansion was going to allow me to connect several storage drives. However when i boot the NUC none of the drives are picked up.
I cant see the device in the BIOS Settings and i cant see the drive when i connect the adapter to a M2-USB adapter and plug that into my windows machine either.

Has anyone had luck using these? Any advice or guidance would be fantastic

We have ConnectWise Automate hooked into Manage. Alerts become tickets. Conditions trigger basic scripts. That part is fine.

The problem is what happens after the ticket is created.

Someone on my team still has to open the ticket, read it, figure out which Automate script applies, run that script manually, check if it worked, and then close or escalate.

That decision-making step is where time disappears. Especially for common tickets like drive space alerts, failed backups, or account lockouts. The script exists. The RMM knows how to run it. But nothing connects the ticket content to the right script automatically.

I have been looking at ways to close that gap. Some options I found:

Rewst for building custom automation between PSA and RMM

Tines for more flexible logic workflows

Neo Agent, which seems to read the ticket and suggest or run the matching Automate script

Building our own inside Automate using EDFs and custom conditions

I am not sold on any one yet. I want to know what works for other MSPs without creating a maintenance nightmare.

For those who have solved this: Did you go with a dedicated automation tool, build inside your RMM, or just accept the manual step?

I am a remote end-user IT support (helpdesk/sysadmin), while I dont answer calls from the hotline, it still involves a lot of communication (chats, online call, remote desktop troubleshooting)

So far I only use chatgpt web base to ask questions/search for solutions and tune up my responses to customers. I feel like I am not maximizing the power of AI so I need more ideas

Any tips? How do you use AI in your work, esp if it is a company provided laptop? Are you able to install Claude and make some of your tasks fully automated

Hi everyone,

I use ServiceNow at work as our ticketing system, and I also need to keep the chat available at all times because users may contact me there. I work as L2 IT Support.

The problem is that if I do not interact directly with ServiceNow for around 25 minutes, it logs me out automatically. Because of that, I can miss incoming chats.

This happens even when I am still actively working on my computer, for example in Word, Notes, PowerPoint, or other work-related tasks. It also happens when I have in-person meetings and cannot keep clicking back into ServiceNow.

I cannot change anything in the settings from my side.

Is there any legitimate way to prevent this, or any built-in ServiceNow feature/workflow that helps with this? For example, would keeping a ticket open, using some page with auto-refresh, or staying in a certain module help, or is this entirely controlled by admins/SSO settings?

I am mainly trying to avoid missing chats while still working on other tasks.

Thanks.

Yes my PC was infected with an info-stealing Trojan from Tomadachi, and within hours I started getting suspicious login alerts across multiple accounts. Gmail, Microsoft, Discord, Riot. My banking/card details and mobile provider all became things I had to worry and stress about asw as I was so scared they’d get to it.

At first, I panicked badly. I reset my PC, changed passwords (on a different fresh device), and thought it was over — but because the infected PC had stayed online for hours while I was running a malware scanner and before I fully contained it, the attacker had already stolen sessions, passwords, and possibly email access. Over the next day, accounts started getting targeted one after another.

Discord and Riot accounts were taken over and their emails were changed. I even found a suspicious hidden inbox rule in my email that was likely being used to hide security alerts.
The hardest part honestly wasn’t just the technical side — it was the mental side. Every notification, every strange email, every failed login made me feel like I was losing control of everything. I barely slept because I kept checking accounts every few minutes convinced something else would happen.

Today, I took my PC to an IT specialist to get it checked and completely wiped, fresh restart, and I spent hours changing all my passwords again on all of my important information and turned 2FA for majority of them, and deleted any suspicious things on my email settings, I also utilised BitWarder to further add security. I also requested new credit cards asw.

As my for my discord and Riot account, I am still waiting for the next steps from the support teams on what to do.

I am still feeling so scared and nervous, and I keep overthinking it’s starting to drive me nuts. I’m just hoping that I’ve done enough. I constantly feel like I’m waiting for another attack I feel horrible.