NinjaOne is a relative latecomer to the Ticketing market, but they believe their high levels of automation in particular will make their customers prefer it over existing options.

Today, NinjaOne is announcing that their new Ninja Ticketing capability has exited beta and entered general availability. This is the first time that Ninja has had such a feature, and they are definitely a latecomer to the space, but the company believes Ninja Ticketing is a state of the art system that will entice MSPs using another offering to make the switch.

Ninja has been around for years under its original name of Ninja RMM, but it never had an internal ticketing capacity before now.

“It’s something that we wanted to do and it made total sense, but we were playing catchup in the industry,” said Michael Shelton, Senior VP of Strategy at NinjaOne. “We were following the Apple model of slow and steady, and focusing on being best in class as an RMM tool. In an environment where our competitors bought additional code to add new capabilities, we were builders not buyers. When you acquire to add features, you get immediate benefit short term, but you get a product that you have to seamlessly integrate into your developed code. Our philosophy has never been to offer every feature but to be the best at what we do offer. We feel strongly that if we develop our own technology, we will be better. So while we were not the first to develop a ticketing product, we think ours will have the most value for our customer base.”

Shelton noted that most MSPs already have some type of ticketing solution in place.

“The percentage is really high,” he said. “I was surprised how many had created their own workflows with spreadsheets or Google Docs, but the majority of the market is using some type of vendor or third party solution.”

Whether or not a ticketing solution is sticky and hard to change depends on customer preference.

“It depends on their own environment,” Shelton stated. “Most will want to have some record of what happened in the past, to export to a CSV that provides this historical dialogue. With some this is a nice-to-have, but with others it is critical. We are working on a project to allow all that information to be imported into Ninja as a historical record. It is under active planning, and we are looking at it for later this year in late Q2 or Q3.”

Shelton emphasized that while much of what Ninja Ticketing does sounds similar to other ticketing solutions, the difference is what’s under the hood.

“That’s what is unique about it,” he said. “A lot of the automation we built under the hood. It lets us use complex scenarios – to create update and solve the ticket. If for example a server goes down, there’s a lot of customization of workflow options. There is a simple and easy to use mantra here too. It is very easy on the eyes. It is not so different from what others do, but it has these compound conditions and automations. We just really feel Ninja is a powerful best-in-class tool and we wanted Ninja Ticketing to stand up alongside it. That’s why there is such a strong emphasis on automation.”

NinjaOne includes a self-service portal that allows end-user self service. They can restore their own backups, connect to endpoints via remote access, and manage their tickets, and more. Users can create, update, and respond to tickets via the portal and check the status of their ongoing issues.

“We really wanted a co-managed environment, where MSPs could easily work with their end customers,” Shelton said. “We do this with a co-managed portal where customer can work on their own tickets with the MSP keeping a close eye on them.”

Ninja Ticketing also features automated proactive ticket creation, which allows monitoring of endpoints for almost any behavior to show leading indicators of failure or disruption. It then lets notifications, alerts, and tickets be created based on those triggers, and simultaneously designed for active remediation.

“This really revamps user permissions, and we are excited about that,” Shelton emphasized. “It provides control over who can see what, and can control access as well as visibility.” This allows for much more proactive IT management. It also links the device to the ticket and provides information about the triggering incident, to provides far more detailed insight into the incident than what would be provided by an end user or even often a technician on ticket creation.

“This 5.3.1. release also allows designated system admins at a site and provides response templates, which have the ability to create customized canned responses, Shelton said.

He also emphasized that Ninja Ticketing has a lot of basic QOL things.

“In beta, we had the ability to delete tickets, but the customer base asked us to be able to export ticket data with customizable options for individual tickets – not just bulk,” Shelton said. “One for example needed all the comments so they could fully audit everything that occurred.”

“I came up as a junior support engineer and have used a ton of ticketing products myself,” Shelton added. “It has been a blast to get input on what people wanted to see existing in a product. We have been consuming anywhere between 50 and 100 feature enhancement requests per week.”

Some of those already on the roadmap for the next few releases include the ability to assign endpoints to an asset owner for better ticket or user mapping, the ability to create custom ticket statuses, and SMTP support for emails.