Delete user, lose their tickets?

bahlquist

Hey everyone, Atera newbie here but liking it so far. I came across something today in Atera that is making me re-think our user termination procedure. FWIW we are using Atera as an internal RMM/PSA - we are not an MSP.

If/when I would delete a user from a site, most often due to the user leaving the company, any tickets they've submitted to our Atera instance are vaporized - literally, I cannot find them (they're not in the deleted ticket filter).

I'm assuming this is designed behavior; but is there a way we can avoid this, without leaving all former employees in Atera until the end of time? We rely on historical ticket data to help resolve recurring issues, run reports, etc.

Thanks in advance!

bahlquist

Ah - think I answered my own question when I came across this same problem addressed in a feature request: https://atera.uservoice.com/forums/936306-ideas-and-feedback/suggestions/46171825-major-flaw-tickets-get-permanently-deleted-if-a

Hopefully we can get some attention on this - the only way around this I can see is to completely neglect user housekeeping in favor of ticket history.

mjones

Ya, the tickets should not be this tied to a user in my opinion.

sarah+success

Hey everyone, Sarah from Atera here.

Thanks so much for bringing this up, and also linking the relevant Feature Request (s/o @questbahlin 🤩). I have brought this to the attention of the relevant product manager as well.

In the meantime, a workaround you can use is placing all terminated users into a specific customer/site for the purpose of keeping them in the system without deleting everything associated with that user.

Let us know how you are able to use this workaround, so others can also use it!

mjones

https://community.atera.com/discussion/comment/592#Comment_592

This works better for those on the "IT" version, but guessing this is basically not supportable for the MSP crowd.

bahlquist

https://community.atera.com/discussion/comment/594#Comment_594

Good point @mjones - this is easy for us, as we only have a handful of sites. But for an MSP who might have 100 customers/sites that would be pretty ugly indeed!

Something I'm playing around with today is putting in a generic user account for each site - I'm just calling it "Retired User Tickets" - and then, updating the User/Requester to this generic user account. Once that ownership change is complete I can then delete the user safely without losing ticket data.

This keeps the ticket in the site it was generated for, which might have some value? For MSP's especially I think so.

Now if there was only a bulk ticket update utility to change ownership of all tickets at once - or, better still, build that in to the delete user prompt to select a user to transfer ownership of all tickets before deleting the user.

gdarino

Technically, ConnectWise handles tickets assigned to a user being deleting by prompting you to choose a new contact to assign the tickets during the delete process.

Procedurally, terminated employee tickets get assigned to their manager. If later on that manager needs to be terminated, then those tickets get assigned to his manager in turn. This worked well for us.

Another option would be to include the ability to "deactivate" a user so it does not display by default (filter) and only minimal information about user and links to tickets can be preserved.

t.dubreuil

Our facturation is based on users and devices…
The best option imho is the "trash bin" (like in Freshdesk) : deleted user are not totally deleted so their tickets stays. They just don't appear anymore in the client contacts (so you can keep tickets and history while having the right count of users)

nina

Hi @gdarino and @t.dubreuil - These are both great suggestions! I have sent this to the Product Manager handling the tickets! Keep ya posted!