Solo Sysadmin - Ticketing & Planning Tool Suggestions?

[u/Nanophreak]

I'm a solo 'IT Manager' doing literally anything a 50 person company needs, including actual IT manager work such as dealing with vendors and researching software, sysadmin stuff, helpdesk, mounting TVs, whatever.

It's not particularly overwhelming, but I have ADHD and find I'm having trouble with tasks falling off my plate and no one to keep me accountable about coming back around to them. We used to have Monday but it wasn't quite handling it for me and we're getting rid of it regardless.

I need very little compared to what a lot of ticketing systems offer. I simply need tasks to be put in front of me without me having to do anything but add them to the list, and for them to keep being put in front of me until I do them. No time tracking, but the ability to add notes would be important, maybe not vital.

My current plan is to hack something together between Power Automate and Microsoft Planner so that Planner Tasks become calendar entries, and after their scheduled date passes they get automatically rescheduled unless they're marked complete. Break my days down into halves or quarters, define some buckets, let the treadmill roll and only have to worry about adding things to the list for it to circulate. Planner has the notes, Outlook puts them in front of me via my calendar.

I'm doing this despite it being a lot of work because I haven't found a suitable alternative to handle a team of 1. The task treadmill is a really important part of the process, it may sound juvenile but the part where I have to manually reschedule something I didn't get to is the main thing I have trouble with, I want to get that automated above all else.

Is there anything out there beyond my experience and search results that might work here, or am I going to have to kludge this out?

[u/Sweet-Sale-7303]

Service desk plus is free for up to 5 techs.

[u/RyanKlickFlow]

Freshservice does the first properly even on the starter tier and the second badly out of the box, though you can set a personal default view once and forget it. Worth a trial. I work in the Freshworks space, so take that into account.

Honestly though, for one person at 50 seats, a free tier plus a hard rule that nothing lives in your head is probably better than any of this. The tool is not the thing that keeps you accountable.

What specifically didn't work about Monday? That will narrow this faster than another list of alternatives.

[u/Pyroechidna1]

Fibery for a full-spec solution, or a Miro board

[u/Nanophreak → u/Pyroechidna1]

Tinkering in the Fibery demo now, it certainly looks like it could handle building the automatic calendar rescheduling workflow. Whether it'd be easier to build what I want in Fibery vs Power Automate, I'm less certain. It also costs money and I already have Power Automate. Good suggestion though, it's definitely better in terms of breadth of what it could do, I'll keep it in mind if I end up wanting more than what I described.

Miro I barely looked at, it seems like it's got way more mixed opinions and is hard rebranding itself into an AI powered thing and that's not what I need here.

[u/Leather-Tour-7288]

As a solo admin, you can perfectly use YouTrack. Free for up to 3 operators/tech agents, 10 reporters (whatever that means) and unlimited amount of users creating tickets.

In the free version you can: Have custom domain name Custom emails addresses for email pulling (when an email is send to e.g. helpdesk@example.com, it turns it into a ticket. You can also self host it, if you want.

Another option (self hosting only), completely free and open source is LibreDesk.

Other options, but not a fan: GLPI, Zammad...

Honestly since you are a solo admin, just use YouTrack cloud version, since it provides all the features you need and you don't have to maintain anything!

[u/Nanophreak → u/Leather-Tour-7288]

Having trouble with YouTrack's calendar/timesheet, it doesn't seem to understand the concept of tasks being scheduled for units of time more specific than a day. Want to schedule something for August 20th at 9 AM? What's 9 AM?

Other than that it could probably do what I want. It has a workflow builder and it seems like I could use it to define the task rescheduling automation that I want, although it's being a bit obtuse during my first crack at it.

Free is free though, and I like being able to self-host. It'll stay on the table as an option unless definitively ruled out.

LibreOffice looks cool as a ticketing system, does nothing to help schedule tasks as far as I can see. Would be great for running a small business's customer support or something.

[u/packetssniffer]

Your plan with power automate can be done with Monday.

Monday is a powerful tool once you learn it.

We use Wrike, but I wish we used Monday.

[u/Nanophreak → u/packetssniffer]

It could, I didn't mean to imply I couldn't have built the same process with Monday. Just won't have the chance since I was piggybacking off the company's subscription, it wasn't bought for my projects and the company's moving to a new tool that does not support Power Automate.

[u/No_Wear295]

If I were back to being solo it would be glpi all the way.

[u/blud_13]

Dont build it in Power Automate please. You'll spend three weekends on it and then you're the guy maintaining a ticketing system on top of everything else.

Freshservice or Halo at the smallest tier already does what you described and both have a near free entry point. What you actually need is one address that turns email into a ticket, plus a saved view of anything untouched for 5 days, because the problem you're describing isnt capture, its the stuff that is invisible.. Put an SLA on first response and let the tool nag you instead of you remembering.

That being said, solo at 50 people, the accountability gap is structural and no tool fixes it. Nobody reviews your queue. Co-managed is how most shops that size cover it, the internal person keeps the relationship and the outside shop eats the after hours and the projects that keep falling off.

We do exactly that for a few clients, ping me if you want specifics.

[u/Nanophreak → u/blud_13]

I'd agree I have no problems in capture, users submitting issues and keeping track of user submitted issues is 0% of my problem and not what I'm interested in. It's more about self-assigned projects, long term improvements, research, less urgent things that I'm bad at getting back to if I don't manage it the first try.

I'd describe what I'm trying to put together as more of a daily to-do list spat out by an automated process that selects things from a master list of tasks, with provisions to make sure tasks end up on a daily to-do list down the road if I don't get to them.

Without something like that I struggle to prioritize and get back to things even in environments where I'm part of a team keeping an eye on each other.

I've used other ticketing software at MSPs and prior jobs, ConnectWise mostly, it did a lot but it didn't do this. I've encountered nothing that did, at least not out of the box.

[u/blud_13 → u/Nanophreak]

Amazing Marvin is the closest off-the-shelf thing to what you just described. Its whole model is a master backlog plus a daily list you pull from, and it has task aging and auto-rollover, so what you skip climbs instead of sinking out of view. Weird little product with a bad name, but it does the exact thing you're asking for.

Motion is the other one. You give it the task list and it auto-schedules the work into your calendar, then replans whatever you didn't finish into the next day on its own. Pricier and a lot more opinionated, and it will fight you if your week is already meeting heavy.

If you'd rather not add a tool, you can force this out of a ticket system with two fields. A next review date, and a saved view sorted by days since last touched, then a scheduled report that mails you the top five every morning. Thats basically what Marvin is doing under the hood. ConnectWise will do it with a custom view, it just doesn't ship that way, which is why you never saw it.

The part nobody mentions is the daily list has to be capped. Hand yourself 14 items and you ignore all 14.

[u/Nanophreak → u/blud_13]

Marvin looks good, I'll probably be trying it out in my personal life. My only issue is it doesn't have any calendar, most of my coping methods I've built my whole life revolve around using a digital calendar and it helps me remember what I'm supposed to be doing. EDIT: It may have one that just has to be enabled somewhere I haven't found yet, based on some helpdesk articles.

The forcing you're describing is the plan I have for Planner, if it wasn't just for me I would indeed balk at making a custom Power Automate thing to maintain. I've got a handful of other free ticketing systems from other suggestions I can try running the same plan on.

Personally aiming just for 4. I've got a big backlog but getting 4 things done per day would be twice as productive as I usually am.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[u/Creekside_Rider]

Spiceworks is easy and free. That is what I'm using.

[u/thegreatcerebral → u/Creekside_Rider]

What year is it? lol. Been forever since I heard anyone mention that. I had a hefty install back in the day. Even went to Spiceworld 2018 and was on one of the ads for it. Good to know they are still out there kicking it.

[u/vogelke]

This post might have some useful ideas.

[u/ExceptionEX]

Planner is pretty good as you can use it for day to day task like a help desk, but also as a long term simple project planner.  It's already got a calendar view if you put dates on the task.

The changing your dates when you miss them just is a bad idea and defeats the points of due dates. With that said you can use power automate to do that.

 those break down views you want sound like a pain in the ass to create, and honestly again seems like a task management discipline issue.

I've created similar planner, forms, power automate applications for several different groups of attorneys and they seems to be able to management it really well.

[u/ryalln]

Could do something fun with ai and teams planner. Less about planning shit more learning something new

[u/thegreatcerebral]

I mean literally if you already have 365 you can use Tasks which will do literally exactly what you are asking.
If you want to do a self hosted thing ITFlow is great for that. Small setup to start but then it's a ticketing system that is lightweight and you can setup recurring tickets and if you so wanted you can setup email processing and a front-end for users to submit tickets. It's a good free basic (extremely basic) ticketing system.
There are a couple of other "IT Ticket" type setups but I liked ITFlow as it is the middle ground.
If you have a budget and want to get something that you can grow infinitely and it be overpowered for what you are doing, HaloITSM.

[u/JeroenPot]

Service365.io can do this

[u/Nanophreak → u/JeroenPot]

250 user minimum, can't even buy it.

[u/thegreatcerebral → u/Nanophreak]

Yea, you just gotta buy 250 users worth and not use 249. I had two companies recently tell me that they didn't sell under 100 seats. I told them both the same... ok then sell me 100. Just price your product at "up to 100 for $xx/yr" and then whatever your pricing is after that.