Unit 02 — ITSM
Beacon puts incidents, service requests, changes and problems in one ticket model. SLAs follow business-hours calendars, and automations are rule-based, versioned and traced. Internal IT teams and MSPs both get per-organization SLA policies, white-label branding and their own terminology from day one.
All four ticket types share one API and model, with an impact-by-urgency priority matrix, merge and link, bulk operations, and separate public and internal notes. SLAs run on 24x7 or business-hours calendars in validated time zones, and an invalid time zone is an error, never a silent switch to UTC. Policies apply per priority and per organization, and a policy in use can't be deleted.
A journey is a versioned automation: a trigger, a condition tree, ordered steps from a fixed list and a required exception path. No user code runs, the same inputs give the same result, and each step is logged on the ticket timeline. A template gallery covers common cases. AI can be a journey step with budget tracking, on your own provider or the platform default.
A Teams bot, a Slack integration and an in-portal assistant share one conversation engine. The chat layer works out intent and adds context but runs nothing: every conversation ends in a ticket or a journey. Email intake, a service catalog, knowledge-base deflection and a known-error database complete the set.
Changes get a CAB workflow, freeze windows, collision detection, risk scoring, configurable post-implementation reviews, approval delegation and emailed approval links with reminders. Major incidents, escalations and on-call schedules are covered too. On the device bridge, each provider declares its latency class, so a technician knows whether an action lands in seconds or at the next policy cycle.
The XLA scorecard tracks confirmed resolutions, reopens, repeat contacts, silence gaps and reassignment bounce. CSAT stays hidden until there are enough responses to mean something. Findings go into an improvement queue.