Escalating priorities and using 'LastUpdated' in searches

RT Users
1

Hi,
We are currently escalating priorities for all queues each night with a
cron job.

escalate tickets for all queues

while (my $queue = $queues->Next) {
my $queuename = $queue->Name;
system("$crontool --search RT::Search::ActiveTicketsInQueue " .
"–search-arg “$queuename” “.
”–action RT::Action::EscalatePriority");
}

Now some people are complaing that they cannot look at tickets that
haven’t been updated in a given time period (by a real person) using
’LastUpdated’ in searches, since most tickets have their priority
updated every night and there is a transaction: root - Priority changed
from�

Is there a way to ignore transactions of priority change when running
queries using ‘LastUpdated’, or perhaps I should not run the cron job at
all. I am not sure that it really provides us with anything at the
moment other than being able to sort on priority. What do other people
do with escalating priorities and using LastUpdated in searches?

Regards,
Jason

2

Hi,
We are currently escalating priorities for all queues each night with a
cron job.

escalate tickets for all queues

while (my $queue = $queues->Next) {
my $queuename = $queue->Name;
system("$crontool --search RT::Search::ActiveTicketsInQueue " .
"–search-arg "$queuename" ".
“–action RT::Action::EscalatePriority”);
}

Now some people are complaing that they cannot look at tickets that
haven’t been updated in a given time period (by a real person) using
‘LastUpdated’ in searches, since most tickets have their priority
updated every night and there is a transaction: root - Priority changed
from?

Is there a way to ignore transactions of priority change when running
queries using ‘LastUpdated’, or perhaps I should not run the cron job at
all. I am not sure that it really provides us with anything at the
moment other than being able to sort on priority. What do other people
do with escalating priorities and using LastUpdated in searches?

Regards,
Jason

Hi Jason,

We initially setup priority escalation nightly as well. And like you
we found that the LastUpdated information was lost. In addition, in
our environment as priorities increased, no additional resources were
actually available to help resolve the higher priority tickets. This
resulted in a large number of tickets with a high priority and often
at the priority cap. So in addition to losing the LastUpdated information,
the use of the priority field to track an issues priority was lost as
well. And one final problem, the additional “noise” priority escalation
transactions also slowed down ticket display as well. I would recommend
not using priority escalation unless you have addressed all of the
problems mentioned above.

Good luck,
Ken

3

Hi,
We are currently escalating priorities for all queues each night
with a
cron job.

escalate tickets for all queues

while (my $queue = $queues->Next) {
my $queuename = $queue->Name;
system("$crontool --search RT::Search::ActiveTicketsInQueue " .
"–search-arg "$queuename" ".
“–action RT::Action::EscalatePriority”);
}

Now some people are complaing that they cannot look at tickets that
haven’t been updated in a given time period (by a real person) using
‘LastUpdated’ in searches, since most tickets have their priority
updated every night and there is a transaction: root - Priority
changed
from?

Is there a way to ignore transactions of priority change when running
queries using ‘LastUpdated’, or perhaps I should not run the cron
job at
all. I am not sure that it really provides us with anything at the
moment other than being able to sort on priority. What do other
people
do with escalating priorities and using LastUpdated in searches?

Regards,
Jason

Hi Jason,

We initially setup priority escalation nightly as well. And like you
we found that the LastUpdated information was lost. In addition, in
our environment as priorities increased, no additional resources were
actually available to help resolve the higher priority tickets. This
resulted in a large number of tickets with a high priority and often
at the priority cap. So in addition to losing the LastUpdated
information,
the use of the priority field to track an issues priority was lost as
well. And one final problem, the additional “noise” priority
escalation
transactions also slowed down ticket display as well. I would
recommend
not using priority escalation unless you have addressed all of the
problems mentioned above.

The RT::Action::LinearUpdate module has a different update algorithm,
but takes a few arguments, including one to stop recording Transactions
and another to stop updating LastUpdated

You can read about the algorithm and the arguments in the POD of
the action module

-kevin