Does this sound familiar? An IT organization in an enterprise company had a periodic problem that caused mini network storms every few weeks, which disrupted business. Because it would have been impractical to have someone watch screens 24×7 to figure out what caused this intermittent problem, the team was inundated with tickets — all of which were opened by customers. Not surprisingly, this had a negative impact on customer satisfaction. It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, a monitoring system could automatically generate a ticket that would immediately start gathering information from the network when the situation next occurred. This would allow the problem to be captured as it was occurring. It would also isolate that problem to a single node, which would then go into an error state and alert IT to the issue. This process, known as intelligent ticketing, can be used to identify the problem and prevent it from recurring. Intelligent ticketing involves the interaction between Service Support and IT Operations. It is part of the bigger picture of the “people-related” processes for service support, including how these processes in­teract with automated availability, performance, and capacity management and analysis solutions to make IT more efficient. There are 3 Stages of Maturity for Intelligent Ticketing:

  •     Action: An action impacts a process, such as incident or change. An event occurs and a ticket is created.
  •     Reaction: Incident data is run through the CMDB and attached to the business service in order to provide better insight into the potential impact of that incident. This gives you the ability to properly prioritize issues based on that impact, and in some cases, helps you find issues before end users report them.
  •     Proactive and Predictive: You stay ahead of the failures by becoming more proactive and predicting when you are not meeting “normal” or “expected” performance or when you are getting close to service level thresholds or limits. This allows you to take action sooner, automatically.

Intelligent ticketing takes data from your monitoring environments and extends it to your business environment, which increases IT transparency and, more importantly, enhances your ability to get in front of problems. With intelligent ticketing, you address business-relevant problems more efficiently and proactively, thus helping IT to have greater alignment with business goals and drive profits. By Doug Mueller