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Administration GuideGetting StartedosTicket

Getting Started with osTicket

This guide takes you from a new account to a working setup on osTicket. It follows the eight steps of the Quickstart on your dashboard, which ticks each one off as you finish it. If you have not signed in yet, start with Getting Started.

Required setup

  1. Connect your osTicket
  2. Index your tickets and knowledge base
  3. Set up classification and attributes
  4. Decide how the AI handles each kind of ticket

Get oriented

  1. Invite your team
  2. Build your knowledge base
  3. Check analytics and feedback
  4. Review billing and your overage preference

1. Connect your osTicket

Start from the setup card on your dashboard, or open Help Desk in the sidebar. Setup takes three steps:

  1. Register Instance. Name the help desk and choose how Flexivity reaches it:
    • Direct connection: Flexivity connects to your internet-accessible osTicket from the cloud. There is nothing to run on your side.
    • On-premise agent: a small Docker container runs alongside osTicket and connects out to Flexivity. Nothing needs to reach your osTicket from the internet, and payment card, government and bank identifiers are masked before anything leaves your network.
  2. Install osTicket Plugin. Download the Flexivity AI plugin and install it in osTicket. See Install and configure the plugin.
  3. Connect osTicket or Connect Agent, depending on your choice in step 1. See Connecting osTicket.

The step is done when the instance is Active and has checked in within the last five minutes. If setup was interrupted, Resume setup on the Quickstart picks it up where you left off.

Connecting also creates your osTicket brand, named after the instance. AI Configuration and the Knowledge Builder are set per brand.

2. Index your tickets and knowledge base

Flexivity needs your past tickets, to find related cases, and your published FAQ articles, which are what the AI answers from. On your instance’s Help Desk page:

  1. On the Ticket History card, click Sync, then Start Sync. Large archives can take a few hours; the sync runs in the background and does not slow osTicket down.
  2. Open Knowledge Sources, and on the osTicket Knowledge Base card, click Sync. After this first sync, changes to published articles are picked up as they happen.

The step is done once both have indexed something. See Syncing ticket history.

3. Set up classification and attributes

Attributes are what the AI records about each ticket, and what your rules act on in step 4. On your instance’s Help Desk page, click Configure on the Classification / Attributes card.

  • Mapped attributes come first. Map an osTicket field, such as the help topic, so the AI can read your team’s value or fill it in. Up to 5.
  • Flexivity attributes are your own, for anything osTicket has no field for, such as urgency. The AI decides each value from its description, so describe each value the way you would to a new agent. Up to 10.
  • System attributes are built in and do not count against either limit. Tick the ones you want, such as Sentiment or Agent has replied.

The step is done once you have mapped an attribute. See Classification / Attributes.

4. Decide how the AI handles each kind of ticket

Open AI Configuration → Conversation Handling Rules. A rule matches tickets by their attributes and sets how far the AI may go with them, from Ignore to Resolve. For example:

  • help topic is Email → Resolve: the AI works with the customer until the request is resolved.
  • sentiment is Frustrated → Gated: a person handles the ticket, with no AI draft.

A ticket no rule matches gets Assist: the AI drafts a reply and an agent decides whether to send it. Most teams start there and move a class of tickets up once they trust the answers.

The step is done once a rule exists, or once you have opened the rules page, if you have decided to keep every ticket at Assist for now. While you are on AI Configuration, look at Answering, Conversations and Summary too. See AI Configuration.

5. Invite your team

Open Users and click Invite User. Choose Admin for colleagues who will change settings, Knowledge Manager for those who look after your knowledge base with the Knowledge Builder, or Read Only for those who only need to look. See Users.

6. Build your knowledge base

Open Knowledge Builder. A run groups your resolved tickets into topics and finds the ones your FAQ articles do not cover. For each, you can draft an article, review it, and push it to osTicket. See Knowledge Builder.

7. Check analytics and feedback

Open Analytics. AI Activity shows what the AI did, ticket by ticket; User Feedback shows how your agents rate its summaries and drafts. See Analytics.

8. Review billing and your overage preference

Open Billing & Usage to see your plan and its monthly allowance of tickets, chat conversations and search sessions. Then choose what happens when the allowance is used up: Overage, where each one over is charged, or Pause, where AI processing stops until the next period and tickets still reach your agents. See Billing.

Next steps

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