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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Suggestion: identify and thread trouble tickets
Many network operators have Trouble Ticket systems (as per RFC1297) which send mails notifying customers, peers and other interested parties of network problems, events and so on. Many of these mails cross my desk, so I thought it might be useful to make two small suggestions to trivially increase the functionality of these mails ... use the mail headers cleverly. Firstly, a lot of us receive a lot of tickets and to ease the workload we filter them into seperate mailboxes. To assist this process, rather than making us all use unreliable filters based on a sender address or a particular format to the subject, consider including a custom X-header, here at HEAnet we use: X-HEAnet-TicketID: [ticket id] X-HEAnet-Ticket-Distribution: [public|noc|personal ..] But only one is really neccessary (though I guess it depends on how easy you want to make subfiltering), and it should be committed to. No matter what you do to your trouble ticketing system the X header should remain. This would avoid the situation of breaking filtering on people when you change whatever unique subtlety they happen to be relying upon. Now secondly, after you've made it easy for people to distuingish your tickets from those of others, consider making it easy for people to distinguish your tickets from each other. For 1 year now, HEAnet have been issueing tickets with Message-ID's generated by our ticketing system, for example: To: [email protected] From: Colm MacCarthaigh <[email protected]> Subject: HEA-NOC/20040519-11 [OPEN] IPv6 packet loss on backbone X-HEAnet-TicketID: 20040519-11 X-HEAnet-Ticket-Distribution: public Message-ID: <[email protected]> And then subsequent updates to the ticket have headers such as: To: [email protected] From: Colm MacCarthaigh <[email protected]> Subject: HEA-NOC/20040519-11 [UPDATE] IPv6 packet loss on backbone X-HEAnet-TicketID: 20040519-11 X-HEAnet-Ticket-Distribution: public In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> References: <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> I'm sure everyone can predict that the next mail would look like: To: [email protected] From: Colm MacCarthaigh <[email protected]> Subject: HEA-NOC/20040519-11 [UPDATE] IPv6 packet loss on backbone X-HEAnet-TicketID: 20040519-11 X-HEAnet-Ticket-Distribution: public In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> References: <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> This simple feature has the effect of enabling mails concerning the same ticket to be threaded/grouped (and whatever gmail is calling it these days) in the users mail client, if their mail-client supports threaded viewing. We all know what it looks like :). If a user wants to see them chronologically instead, just turning the threaded viewing off is enough. We've had no reports of problems and many people have found it useful, and personally I find TT mails substantially more manageable in this form. If tickets are logged to a HTML archive, threaded mails can help there also by allowing a nice way to see all ticket updates relevant to a single issue. I would imagine that all ticketing systems already have a unique number per ticket (the ticket id) and incrementing a counter for each update/close is not hard, so it's a simple enough feature to add (though making sure the message ID's are in fact unique is critical). It's probably not a new idea, and it has almost certainly been implemented before but none of the trouble tickets I get implement it. So, my humble suggestion is to consider adding it in the next rewrite of your ticketing system, or requesting it as a feature from your TT system vendor. There may be problems we have not encountered in operation or I have not considered, if so - comments welcome. -- Colm |