There are a lot of things you can actually accomplish with a homemade Help Desk, from managing troubleshooting logs for your family to creating real-world experiences for your IT career. In this blog, I will discuss my experience with Spiceworks and how I utilize this ticketing system to document the work I’ve done.

What is Spiceworks?

First of all, what even is Spiceworks? It’s an IT community at its core; you can ask and answer questions on their forum. However, it also provides multiple IT tools that will come in handy in this blog post. In my opinion, Spiceworks is a wonderful Internet presence; it’s a statement about the IT spirit: Informational, No gatekeeping, Beginner-friendly. I would love to write a comprehensive breakdown about Spiceworks, but that is for another time. Now we should head back to the topic today:

Why Help Desk Documentation Matters?

In this tech-driven world, nothing is perfect; something might and definitely will go wrong. You, no matter if you work in IT or not, will eventually need to troubleshoot something. As a tech enthusiast myself, I host a Help Desk system for my family and friends, and myself, as a way to document and improve all the work I have ever done.

But that’s just not it, for me personally (a nail technician trying to break into IT), this is a chance to see how real-world problems get solved, the tools that I need, and implement new techniques or industrial best practices into the theoretical knowledge that I got from the CompTIA A+. For you, though, my dear audiences, there are even more reasons to try using Spiceworks or Help Desk documentation:

If you are just starting and trying to break into tech: Building a Help Desk at home gives you real experiences that you can leverage in a job interview setting. You can answer the questions from the hiring managers with real-world-based answers, not just textbook theories.

If you are already working in Help Desk: Even better, building a home lab is a must-experience for all the aspiring Help Desk personnel out there. Using the free version of Spiceworks gives you plenty of resources to create your own Help Desk that resembles your real work environment. This gives you more time and freedom to explore and learn from advanced tickets that your supervisor had closed, or try a different approach to the tickets that bugged you for days. The possibility is unlimited, and the sky is the limit for you.

If you are helping family and friends with their tech issues: A common analogy is that devices can be pretty similar to humans, some friends of yours always get the cold, and some printers of yours always have a paper jam in tray number 2. Keeping track of what you fixed and how you fixed them can be a quick way to close a ticket. Especially in environments like family and friends, where they don’t often get new devices, and the problems just pop up from devices that you usually fix.

Or just for fun: Some people go swimming, some people are really into custom keyboards. You? You like to document and organize tickets in your free time. You like to have some niche topics to share with your friends about your tickets. Well, go for it, my friend! Just like what Elphaba said in “Wicked” (hopefully) : “It’s time I try defying ticket flow!”

How did I get to Spiceworks?

To be honest, I started with Google Docs at the beginning. This is how it looks: The problem with this approach is, well, obviously, it’s just a Google Docs file. It lacks features like managing multiple tickets at once, categorizing them (for easier searching), and looks very plain and unprofessional. Especially when the number of my tickets grows, Google Docs creates a bottleneck for the scalability of the whole system. That’s when I moved to Spiceworks. They have this IT tool called Cloud Help Desk, and like the name, it gives you a free Help Desk ticketing system. It also has many different plans, so you can upgrade if you want to implement it for your business. But for me, the free plan is much more than enough.

Spiceworks features:

The first thing you will see when logging in with your account to the Cloud Help Desk is the Dashboard tab. This is where you see more data about the tickets, which can come in pretty useful if you are managing a team or need to meet a specific quota. The second tab is the Tickets tab. This is where you make new tickets, notes, and public responses. You can also search tickets with different categories, see closed tickets, see who was assigned to different tickets, and a lot more that I haven’t discovered yet. The interface for each ticket is pretty straightforward. It consisted of the ticket name (top left corner), the ticket details (right below), the yellow box that you see is my internal notes of the troubleshooting step I took (this will not be showed to end user but just the Help Desk team), and the last part is the public response (what the technician want to announce or educate the user on) The third one is the Knowledge Base tab, which I am very interested in. Apparently, this is where you submit articles to inform other colleagues and document useful pieces of information that will come in handy in the future. Because at the end of the day, troubleshooting is not only about fixing problems but also about how to do it efficiently. Keeping a system of documents and articles will speed up the entire process, decrease the guessing element in troubleshooting steps, and specify solutions for some special devices (where the same problem repeats or is just a really legacy, niche system).

However, I haven’t spent any time creating any articles yet. After a couple of blog posts, I think I will start diving into that and share the article with communities like Spiceworks, too.

The last two tabs are a little bit confusing, to be honest. They’re called reports and exports. Their function is primarily to allow you to download tickets. The difference is that the reports tab can provide a much more specific categorizing (letting you group tickets from day and time, also from their main problem (hardware, software, etc)); while the exports tab lets you download all the tickets of each organization or a specific time frame with limited categorizing.

I can be wrong, though. Because for my project I just mainly use the first three tabs (Dashboard, Ticket, and (will be using) Knowledge Base).

How do I actually use Spiceworks?

So, wow, that’s a lot of upgrading from Google Docs. How did I implement it in my daily troubleshooting life? First, I created two different organizations (yes, you can do that in Spiceworks, that’s like creating two different Help Desk systems for two different companies). The first one I used as a sandbox, to fidget with tickets, discover new functions, etc. The second one is my professional ticket system. I put the best tickets in there, with checked grammar and typos. This is also where all of my screenshots came from (you won’t be able to see the darkness and chaos of my sandbox, and I wish I could be in your position).

Secondly, I started putting old tickets that I had solved into the system. I also search for some interesting cases on the Internet to document. You can check all of my tickets on the troubleshooting log tab on this website.

Even though many tickets came from real-life scenarios where I was troubleshooting for my family, I tried to put them in a corporate setting, creating a more professional feeling to all the tickets. Because at this point, I’m still looking for an IT job, and I don’t want to come into an interview talking about how I got yelled at by my sister for three hours while trying to fix her laptop battery. Instead, it can be how I implement the best methodology to troubleshoot Sally’s laptop from the HR department to resolve her power issues. Even though I take all the same steps, I wanted to practice doing things the right way before my first IT job, not just fixing things, but documenting, communicating, and following best practices.

The human side that nobody talks about in IT tickets

Some of my tickets have little twists, too. Because I know that IT in general, or just Help Desk specifically, is not solely about computers and networks, but also human and real-life interaction too. Sometimes users lie, sometimes they are very unhappy, even though it is not your fault. Dealing with all of that and showing those details gives the tickets a human touch, a slight warmth and authenticity in the cold world of 1s and 0s.

Furthermore, that helps me enjoy making the tickets quite a lot. Reading the little stories behind a shutdown laptop (ticket ID #009) or a rushed technician (ticket ID #002) gives me a feeling that I am discovering something more, outside of the ticket and into the human world.

For example, ticket ID #009, the user told me that he was working on his laptop for hours on end when the device decided to stop working. He did not click save even a single time on the legal document that he was working on. So I try everything, I check the Cloud (he was disconnected from the Internet, so nothing was synced on Cloud), no auto backup on the system either. I even tried the nuclear option: Looking for a Windows Restore Point, because if he was working in the same time frame that the system makes a Restore Point, we might have some hope. Turns out the Point was created a whole week before! So that data is gone with the wind, forever!

Then I tried to dig a bit to prevent the same problem from happening. I use the Event Viewer utility and confirm an ID 41 (which means that the system was indeed shut down unexpectedly). I checked the hardware; there was no visible damage to the adapter. The power socket is in good condition. Then, “It must be the battery acting up,” I thought. I ran powercfg /batteryreport (gives you a battery report), and the battery health was reported as “Good”. But I also noticed that the battery percentage gradually declined until it shut down. THE GUY FORGOT TO PLUG THE POWER ADAPTER INTO HIS LAPTOP SO IT RAN OUT OF BATTERY.

As a safety measure, I make sure that the device informs him when the power reaches 20% and 5%. I reported back to him, and he was not happy. He wants to escalate to a higher tier to help him revive his work. I complied with the request even though I knew for sure that the data was gone, and also talked with the user about it. But it is for the best that we never argue with our dear users.

Quite a ride of emotions you see? That’s why sometimes creating tickets and solving them gives me the feeling that I should write a novel or make a puzzle video game involving reading behind the stale IT tickets and piecing together findings to discover a silent story. (I might do that, so stay tuned in the future!)

Goodbye notes:

That is it! Working with Spiceworks gave me more than just knowledge about the tools. I learned how to think like an IT professional, how to troubleshoot systematically, and document clearly.

For the near future, I will be working on creating Knowledge Base articles and will write a separate blog post on an extremely difficult IT ticket. So stay tuned for that deep dive.

You can check out the Troubleshooting Log tab on this site. And if you have questions or want to share your own setup, connect with me via my “Get In Touch” section on the Home or About tab on this website, and I will be more than happy to talk to you!

Two weeks ago, I didn’t think that I could even pass the A+. Yet here I am, doing projects and finding jobs. It was a very long and difficult process. But I pushed through, and I believe so can you. I don’t know what your goal is right now, and I know sometimes it might feel a little hopeless. However, it will change; tomorrow will be better. So please don’t give up, and I will see you on the other side.