HaloITSM

HaloITSM Guides

Documentation to assist with the setup and configuration of the HaloITSM platform

Guides > Using your Knowledge Base

Using your Knowledge Base

The Knowledge Base


The Halo knowledge base functionality is used internally in the system by agents to ensure efficient resolution of common incidents, but it is also used externally by end-users on the self-service portal. This allows end-users to “self-serve” and fix their own problems without logging a ticket.


Checkout the HaloPSA Academy course on the Knowledge Base: Course You will need to create an account to access the academy.


Viewing, Editing and Adding Articles


To add an article, head to the knowledge base by clicking on the book icons on the main page of your web-app. This takes you to the main screen for articles:



Here you will see a search bar and filter list, if you have the following setting set in the configuration Configuration > Knowledge Base (Single select called "Agent App KB Area View"


You will see the list of categories. 



If you are in this abovd view, click on "New Article" , if in the other view press ⊕ in the top right to create a new article. Here you input the description of the common issue/question, the resolution to this and any attachments as well as the title.



The tags field is used to add tags onto articles, which are searchable and will match on the categories attached to the ticket and display in the resolution finder.


The setting below this allows you to determine which teams can view the article internally in the web-app. This is particularly useful when you have a large number of articles, as it stops technicians having to search through a number of articles which are not relevant to their role.


There is also a setting that allows you to determine which FAQ lists you would like to group the article into. This will display groups as dropdowns in the tree, when the tree view is enabled.


Knowledge Base Settings


To configure your knowledge base at a higher level, head to the configuration console and click on “Knowledge Base”. This will show you the following settings and more:


  • Enable Article Suggestions
    • Matching articles will be suggested for tickets with an incident or problem ITIL ticket type.
    • This enables the resolution finder to match on incidents or problems. 
  • Categories must match a tag:
    • This tells the resolution finder to only match the category of the ticket to the knowledge base article tags, otherwise it can match on the content of the article too.
  • Allow matching based on ticket summary:
    • This allows matches to be made on the summary of the ticket.
  • Allow matching based on text custom fields:
    • Enabling this allows any custom text field values to be used to match on the tags of articles.
  • Article Creation settings declare how your agents, its users, can add tickets and their resolutions to the knowledge base, this is decided on a ticket type by ticket type basis.

For a more comprehensive list of settings descriptions, checkout this admin guide knowledge base settings 


Adding Videos to Articles

Adding videos to your articles can be an excellent method of making your knowledge base more engaging for end-users, particularly if you are looking to make your articles available on your end-user portal.

On any article (when in edit mode) simply click on the video camera icon to add a video. There are 2 methods of adding videos to articles:

  • Insert a link:
    • Click on the link icon and add in the URL of the video you wish to link the article to, then click insert.
  • Embedded code:
    • Click on the HTML icon and write in the code of the video you wish to embed.


Reporting on Articles 

You can use the table KBViewLog for reporting purposes. It stores the Agent/User ID, KB Article ID and Datetime of every view of a knowledgebase article. 

For a report on all of the articles in your system along with other things, use:

select id, abstract, kbtags, datecreated, faultid from kbentry


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