Assigning priority on incoming tickets?

Hi folks.

Here, we’ve historically had a paging system that sends pages to
sysadmins if-and-only-if someone reports a problem as
“critical”. That paging was tied to our legacy system, which
allowed problem-reporters to rank tickets by priority.

With RT, there’s no way for problem reporters to assign priority
to their own tickets. I could have a separate queue for critical
problems, where only critical problems send mail to our pager
address, but that seems less than ideal. I just don’t want
our sysadmins to be awakened at 3am by a problem less than
“our systems are [literally, figuratively] on fire.”

Anyone here have a similar situation? How did you deal with it?

srl
Shane Landrum (srl AT boston DOT com) Software Engineer, boston.com

Hi

well actually you can try this with the enhanced-mailgate. It should work,
RT-Requestor works the rest I haven�t tested yet.

Andrei Gologan----- Original Message -----
From: “Shane Landrum” srl@mail.boston.com
To: rt-users@fsck.com
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 4:04 PM
Subject: [rt-users] Assigning priority on incoming tickets?

Hi folks.

Here, we’ve historically had a paging system that sends pages to
sysadmins if-and-only-if someone reports a problem as
“critical”. That paging was tied to our legacy system, which
allowed problem-reporters to rank tickets by priority.

With RT, there’s no way for problem reporters to assign priority
to their own tickets. I could have a separate queue for critical
problems, where only critical problems send mail to our pager
address, but that seems less than ideal. I just don’t want
our sysadmins to be awakened at 3am by a problem less than
“our systems are [literally, figuratively] on fire.”

Anyone here have a similar situation? How did you deal with it?

srl

Shane Landrum (srl AT boston DOT com) Software Engineer, boston.com


rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Hi Shane,

Yep, same situation here.

At first, I wanted people to be able to send email to a separate address
that would enter the ticket in RT and set the priority higher than default.
This is pretty easy to do if you don’t mind modifying rt-mailgate to accept
another command line argument and then set the priority if that argument is
passed. Then, in your mailer aliases you can create an alias that calls
rt-mailgate w/the new command line argument.

Then, I wanted to have an email sent to our pager system to alert us. This
can probably be done using your mailer and having it forward a copy of the
message to your pager system–I didn’t choose this route. What I ended up
doing was modifying our support request web form to add a dropdown for
importance–defaulting to normal. The script that processes the form sends
a message to my paging system if the importance is high or critical and also
send an email to the RT address I mentioned above.

To make all this work, we notified our customers that in order for a ticket
to be created with a high or critical priority they had to use the Web
interface. If they just send an email, it will be normal priority. The
only drawback is if our site is down but that in itself will trigger all
kinds of bells, buzzers and pages.

Hope this helps,
Chris Scott
Host Orlando, Inc.
http://www.hostorlando.com/-----Original Message-----
From: rt-users-admin@lists.fsck.com
[mailto:rt-users-admin@lists.fsck.com]On Behalf Of Shane Landrum
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 10:05 AM
To: rt-users@fsck.com
Subject: [rt-users] Assigning priority on incoming tickets?

Hi folks.

Here, we’ve historically had a paging system that sends pages to
sysadmins if-and-only-if someone reports a problem as
“critical”. That paging was tied to our legacy system, which
allowed problem-reporters to rank tickets by priority.

With RT, there’s no way for problem reporters to assign priority
to their own tickets. I could have a separate queue for critical
problems, where only critical problems send mail to our pager
address, but that seems less than ideal. I just don’t want
our sysadmins to be awakened at 3am by a problem less than
“our systems are [literally, figuratively] on fire.”

Anyone here have a similar situation? How did you deal with it?

srl
Shane Landrum (srl AT boston DOT com) Software Engineer, boston.com

rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Hi

well actually you can try this with the enhanced-mailgate. It should work,
RT-Requestor works the rest I haven�t tested yet.

Right, but enhanced-mailgate seems to just be for creating new tickets,
unless I’m missing something. I need my web-UI users to be able to
tell me how serious their problem is so I know whether or not to
send out a page.

srl
Shane Landrum (srl AT boston DOT com) Software Engineer, boston.com

Right, but enhanced-mailgate seems to just be for creating new tickets,
unless I’m missing something. I need my web-UI users to be able to
tell me how serious their problem is so I know whether or not to
send out a page.

How about you make an owner “urgent” the users can choose and Notify Owner
on creation ?

Andrei

It’s a trivial change to the Create.html template to contain a field called
InitialPriority and to the Display.html template to pass that value
in the call to Ticket->Create. Longer term, the ticket submission page needs
to get fleshed out in the core.

-jOn Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 10:38:03AM -0400, Shane Landrum wrote:

On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 04:24:14PM +0200, Andrei Gologan (agologan@gmx.mis.de) wrote:

Hi

well actually you can try this with the enhanced-mailgate. It should work,
RT-Requestor works the rest I haven´t tested yet.

Right, but enhanced-mailgate seems to just be for creating new tickets,
unless I’m missing something. I need my web-UI users to be able to
tell me how serious their problem is so I know whether or not to
send out a page.

srl

Shane Landrum (srl AT boston DOT com) Software Engineer, boston.com


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rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

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