Platform Orientation

This guide introduces you to the Serval platform interface, helping you understand where to find key features and how to navigate efficiently.

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Dashboard Overview

When Home is enabled for your organization, it’s the landing page for your personal workspace and for end users. Serval continues to honor a configured default team and restore your previous team or organization workspace. A default team takes precedence over the previous workspace. Links to a specific ticket or another page still open that destination.

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Your home page

Home brings together your requests, approvals, Inbox updates, and journeys across teams. When enabled, Home replaces New request in personal and global navigation. From any workspace, open Home near the top of the sidebar, above Inbox. When Home isn’t enabled, New request keeps its existing page or dialog behavior. Home shows only the sections you have permission to use. Start and send a request on Home under What do you need help with? Home reuses the personalized greeting and request editor. Let Serval route your request automatically, or select a team. Select a team to add file attachments. Manual Ticket opens the ticket form when you have permission to use it. The Request access, Service catalog, and Knowledge cards appear below the request editor when your permissions and organization settings allow them. Request options follow the teams available to receive requests. Home keeps a separate request draft. Team ticket creation uses the request dialog only where that separate feature is enabled; enabling Home doesn’t enable it or change the existing request page’s catalog options. On larger screens, request entry and tickets appear on the left. Pending approvals, Inbox, Ongoing issues, and Your journeys appear on the right. These sections stack on narrow screens. Review your work in these sections:

• My tickets: Your submitted requests, with open tickets shown by default and the most recently updated first. The count reflects your search and filters and excludes deleted requests. Select a ticket to open it, or choose View all to see your requests.
• Assigned to me: Tickets assigned to you, with open tickets shown by default and the most recently updated first. The tab remains available when no tickets match. Select a ticket to open it, or choose View all to see the full assigned list.
• Ongoing issues: A summary of active major incidents you can access. Select it to open details for up to three incidents, with the most recently updated first. Select an incident card to open it. If more than three match, select View all in the dialog to open the ticket list filtered to active major incidents.
• Pending approvals: Up to two decisions waiting for you in recent Inbox activity. Use Approve or Deny for a quick decision, or select an approval to open it in the Inbox. Decisions that require justification open the approval in Inbox so you can provide it. Opening these details marks the notification as read. Optional justification and delegation are available in Inbox when configured for the approval. Choose View all to review pending approvals. The count includes pending approvals beyond the two shown. A + after the count means older activity may contain more approvals. If older activity remains and no recent approvals are loaded, View appears instead of zero.
• Inbox: Up to three recent updates, with the newest first. Pending approvals appear in their own section. Completed approval outcomes can appear here. If the preview has no updates but older activity remains, Review your inbox appears instead of an empty state. Select an update to open it in Inbox without your saved filters hiding the selection. This keeps your saved Inbox view unchanged. Choose Open inbox to return to your saved view.

Switch between My tickets and Assigned to me in the ticket panel. Both tabs start with Open, which includes tickets waiting for work or already in progress. Each tab keeps its own search and filters when you switch tabs. Use Search tickets to find a ticket and the dropdown filters to narrow by status, priority, and ticket type. These controls stay visible below the tabs. Use the search field’s × button to clear the search without changing your filters. The status dropdown offers All, Open, Closed, and Closed in the last 30 days. Use the last option to inspect recently completed work. For team, custom-date, due-date, SLA, or other advanced filters, choose View all to open the full Tickets view. The ticket list is read-only; open a ticket to make changes. When you have no open tickets, choose View all tickets in the empty state to include closed tickets. The panel loads 20 tickets at a time. Scroll within the panel to load more tickets automatically. View all opens the full list for the selected ticket tab with its search and filters, without changing your saved Tickets view. Tickets use the same summary layout on desktop and mobile: title, ticket number, status where your permissions allow, and the latest comment time or creation time. Open a ticket for requester, assignee, priority, and other details. The action-required indicator highlights tickets waiting on you. The journey section appears when you are the requester of a journey that isn’t complete. It shows a journey’s name and overall progress, including work assigned to you and other people, plus its due date when available. Select the highlight to open that journey. If you have two or three journeys, selecting the highlight opens a dialog where you can choose one. Journeys with unavailable progress also appear. Completed journeys leave Home.

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Navigation Structure

The sidebar is organized around workspaces. A workspace switcher near the top lets you move between your personal workspace, the organization workspace (Org Admins only), and each team you belong to. Selecting a workspace swaps the navigation below it to the sections for that workspace, so you only see what’s relevant to where you’re working. These actions stay pinned above the switcher, available from any workspace: Personal workspace Your own work across teams: Depending on your setup, the Personal workspace can also include Access Review Tasks (when you have access reviews assigned) and Journeys (when you have an active journey). Organization workspace Org Admins can open Catalyst, Workflows, and Skills for the organization management team from a grouped card in this workspace. Integrations appears separately below the card, where you manage connections for user ingestion and other organization workflows. Each item follows the management team’s permissions; Catalyst also requires the Catalyst capability. You can pin these pages for quick access in the production environment. The Users, Analytics, and Settings items are visible to Org Admins only. Users brings together the directory, org chart, and ingestion sources. Other members can still explore the org chart from a person’s profile or an existing chart link. Team workspaces Switch to a team to see that team’s tools, grouped so related features sit together. The team’s automation tools sit together at the top: A Service Management group holds the everyday pages: The team’s remaining sections follow as their own items: End users People who aren’t part of a team workspace, such as employees who only submit requests, see a simplified sidebar with no workspace switcher: New request, Inbox, Tickets, Access, and Service catalog. When enabled for your organization, Home replaces New request in this sidebar and is your default landing page. Profile menu Your profile sits at the bottom of the sidebar. Click your name or avatar to open your profile, or click the more (⋮) button next to it to open the profile menu:

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Teams: How Serval is organized

Serval is built around team workspaces, which often correspond to teams in your company (for example IT Support, Security, or HR). Workflows, skills, knowledge, access management, integrations, and the majority of other automations are configured per team. Tickets are routed to teams, and permissions are team-scoped (you might be a Manager on one team and an Agent on another).

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Quick Actions

Common tasks you can do from anywhere in Serval: To move between pages (tickets, workflows, team settings, and more), open the command palette with ⌘K and start typing. Open a ticket to reveal ticket-specific shortcuts (assign, label, set status, reply, and more), or press ? anywhere for the full, context-aware list.

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Command Palette

Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) to open the command palette. The command palette provides quick access to navigation, actions, and search from anywhere in Serval: type to find tickets, workflows, teams, or run commands without navigating through menus.

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Keyboard Navigation Between Tickets

When viewing a ticket list, press J to move to the next ticket and K to move to the previous ticket. When you navigate back to the list, Serval returns you to the same position.

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Search

Press / to focus the search box on the current page, such as the ticket list or app list. To search across Serval for tickets, workflows, teams, and more, open the command palette with ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux).

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Search Tips

• Ticket search: Search by ticket number, requester name, or content
• People search: Find users by name or email
• Workflow search: Search by workflow name or description
• Filters: Add type:ticket or status:open to narrow results