One of the main difficulties I've faced in selling a cloud-hosted solution to management is my organization's backup requirements (I work for a public university). As a whole the university would rather use a subpar but on-premise tool that can throw data into our tape backup cluster, than a fantastic-but-cloud-hosted tool that locks in your data.

FreshService does allow manual data exporting so our data isn't locked in (yay I can get management onboard), but I'm still stuck with the need to do manual, periodic exports using the UI (and in two different places- I'll need to export Hardware & Software from the CMDB, then export actual CI's from the Account area of the Admin tab), receive the emails, download the files, then rename & archive them in backup directories which are later grabbed & pushed to tape backups.

It would be amazing if FreshService could offer scheduled, programmatic exports. I toyed with the idea of using the Scheduler to create a ticket which would trigger Dispatch'r to generate the export emails, but exporting isn't an action available to Dispatch'r :(. (And I'd still have to manually download & organize the files of course.)

One possible way (that would integrate perfectly into my environment; other customers please chime in!) would be using a view under the "Admin" area of the web app to provide scheduling criteria (e.g. "weekly on Friday"), an SFTP URL, credentials, and a file naming scheme, so that the FreshService backend can do the exports, reach out to one of our university SFTP servers, push the exported file(s), and disconnect.

Is this at all possible? If so it would give customers the hands-off data retention benefits of an on-premise solution like those offered by ManageEngine, but with the Fresh user experience [I can't stand using ManageEngine products! :)].

Edit: I see another feature request discussing scheduled reports, but it sounds like Doron is thinking more along the lines of emailed PDF reports and not automatic database dumps. Just wanted to remove any ambiguity. Link:

https://support.freshservice.com/support/discussions/topics/295299

Hi Narain!

> Would you be able to parse email to a particular email id and send it to your servers?

You guessed the issue exactly- My university uses an on-premise Exchange instance with well over 5000 users, and while we can use Outlook Rules to sort email inside our own mailboxes (and I could have a rule look for subjects containing certain strings), we can't have a rule that lets Outlook trigger code on either the Exchange server or our local machines to move files around.

That's why I suggested a push-style, SFTP-based function in my post because it's the only arrangement I can think of that would be agnostic to clients' various email systems. (And in our case it would not be too difficult to put an SFTP "dropbox" server in our network's DMZ to enable this.)

So in a perfect world it would be great if FreshService could automatically drop our data files into the correct place for backup because that is completely hands-off, but using the scheduler to email the data on a preset frequency would be much better than nothing at all : ). (It would save me from creating calendar events and having to log in & interact with the UI to get the files, which is a nice time-saver.)

Thank you for your responsiveness! I'm looking forward to hearing the team's response either way.

That will be a very useful feature! Thank you for taking it to the developers : )

Any update on this? Its been over a year.

Ed, I've had some other interactions with FreshService/Desk that make me 99.9% sure they are not going to implement this. One of their marketing pages (link: http://freshservice.com/online-service-desk-software) says "No strings[...]You can export everything anytime." but that is patently false.

The part of the CMDB that makes it useful is the relationships- You can store lists of stuff (assets, CIs, etc. etc.) in spreadsheets, but it's the ability to store relational data that makes a CMDB useful- And not only can you not export relationships, but currently it's not even on their roadmap. I got this response from Praveen when I asked about exporting relationships:

"Exporting the CI with relationships is not in roadmap for now but will taken as a feature request for future"

Maybe they'll change their mind in the future, but until then I will not be using any Fresh[x] products because I don't want to be locked in to their solution.