4 Examples of a Trouble Ticket

John Spacey, August 18, 2017

A trouble ticket is a data entity for tracking an issue. They are used by a broad range of software for incident and problem management. The following are common examples of a trouble ticket.

Incident Ticket

An incident is any issue or perceived issue. They are typically submitted by customers or internal customers. Incident tickets can also be created by an automated process such as a monitoring tool. An incident ticket is used to track all progress on repairing an incident and may be updated by customer service, service desk, customers and support teams.

Problem Ticket

A problem is the root cause of issues. A single problem may cause thousands of issues. In some cases, issues are addressed with a temporary fix but a problem remains as a fix may require code changes or equipment. As such, problem tickets can remain open for an extended period of time.

Alarms

Alarms are automatic errors and warnings generated by equipment and software. In many cases, ticket management software can monitor and analyze alarms to automatically generate incident tickets. This may require complex logic as only a small percentage of alarms are actual incidents that impact customers.

Correlation

It is common for a single incident to lead to a large number of trouble tickets. For example, hundreds of customers may submit tickets when something is down. Trouble tickets may have a parent/child relationship that allows all related tickets to be managed as a set. Alternatively, tickets may be marked as duplicates with a single ticket used to manage related incidents. This process may be automated by an event correlation engine.

Overview: Trouble Ticket
Type	Ticket Management
Definition	A data entity for tracking an issue.
Related Concepts	Ticket Management » Incident Management » Problem Management » Internal Customers » Support Levels » Root Cause »