A Business Intelligence Solution for a Powerful Service Desk Platform

CDESK is an office ticketing and service management system originally developed at SEAL IT Services and is now offered and maintained by Inova Logic. With more than 20 years of experience on the market, it serves as a central environment for managing service requests, incidents, SLAs, assets, and work tracking, supporting IT, business, and service teams alike.

In recent years, the client has expanded CDESK's reach among large enterprise clients, including well-known Slovak and Czech companies such as UNION, ZSSK (Slovak rail company), Forvis Mazars, Seyfor, and the Czech Academy of Sciences. Our collaboration began with the need to build a professional BI solution that would allow them to deliver advanced analytics directly on top of customer CDESK's data.

The client needed to improve how CDESK presented data to its users. The original Power BI report, built internally, had multiple issues: 

• visually and functionally insufficient
• inaccurate or incomplete data outputs
• long loading times
• frequent crashes when working with large datasets

The core challenge was the absence of a database layer. All data had to be extracted exclusively through the CDESK API, which was:

• slow
• paginated and restricted
• unstable with large data volumes
• inconsistent across different CDESK versions

Since the report was used internally and also offered as a premium add-on to CDESK customers, the client needed a solution that was reliable, scalable, and capable of operating across dozens to hundreds of different environments.
 

We completely redesigned the original report and began actively evolving it. Today, it is a robust analytics solution that we continue to improve with new features and capabilities. Also, we developed a new centrally managed Power BI report that automatically adapts to each CDESK environment based on an authentication token (API + user + password combination). The solution currently operates across 200+ client instances, each with different permission settings and data structures.

1. Understanding the data
We analyzed available API endpoints, identified their limitations, and designed a strategy for efficient data extraction, transformation, and unification.

2. Optimizing the original data model
We standardized data structures, eliminated redundant API calls, and implemented processes that accelerated large-dataset processing by more than 50%.

3. Expanding the data model
We continuously add new modules based on CDESK’s development - including requests, work orders, tasks, request duration and reaction distribution, fills, contracts, and service costs.

4. Visualization and testing
Since the report must run across an extensive combination of environment settings, development and testing are challenging. We have access to about 10 environments, each with different configurations and permissions. Despite these limitations, we maintain a stable and unified reporting solution.
 

The outcome is an analytics solution that has become an integral part of the CDESK product, while CDESK customers gain clear, actionable insights without having to build their own reporting, thereby increasing the value of the product itself.

Today, the Power BI solution:

• operates across hundreds of CDESK environments
• processes data quickly and reliably
• serves as both a sales and a competitive advantage
• supports the long-term technological and product growth of CDESK
• improves data quality and identifies discrepancies in real time

Our collaboration with Inova Logic has continued for more than two years, with a clear goal of continuously advancing the BI solution and the CDESK product as a whole.