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Title
What is escalation used for and how do I set it up? -
Description
The Escalation process allows you to send out automatic emails when a ticket remains in an Open state longer than a certain time. This provides you a way to monitor SLA type events as well as allowing you to notify a large group when something doesn't get handled appropriately. -
Resolution
There are three settings that control this process.
- What tickets should be escalated?
- How long can a ticket be open before an escalation mail is sent out?
- Who should get the mails?
- What tickets should be escalated?
Tickets are escalated if they have been open longer than the time specified by their priority setting.
Each ticket has a Priority. Priorities can have an Escalation Time. Tickets also have a Status that can either be Open, Stalled, or Closed. Tickets that are in an Open Status will send an escalation email every Escalation Time minutes.
For instance, by default the KACE SMA has a Priority value of High. It has an Escalation Time of 30 minutes. For each ticket that is marked as High Priority, every thirty minutes escalation emails will be sent out notifying people that the ticket is still Open.
2. How long can a ticket be open before an escalation mail is sent out?
Tickets that are Stalled or Closed will not have mails sent out. Moving a ticket from Open to Stalled or Closed and back to Open will not change the creation time, so the escalation mails will continue to process based on the original time. For instance, open a ticket, close it after 5 minutes, then reopen it after 35 minutes, and an email will go out saying that the ticket is older than 30 minutes. After that ticket goes out, the next email will not go out again for 30 minutes.
3. Who should get the mails?
Finally, who should receive the emails? The Email on Events settings control who gets the escalation emails. There are four email addresses that the KACE SMA knows about. The owner, submitter, ticket cc and category cc. Owner and submitter relate to the people involved with the ticket. Each Ticket also has a CC list, this is a list of emails of specific people that may also be interested in this specific ticket. Finally, the Ticket's Category has a CC list.
The notion here is for you to be able to say "If a High priority Networking ticket has been open for 30 minutes, send mail to the networking_trouble@domainexample,com and to bill_manager@domainexample,com" which would help notify more people that there was some ticket that needed to looked it.
Note that the Priority is being set either by the default settings on new tickets, or by the help desk admin setting the priority. The end user who might be creating a ticket through the user portal is not able to set the priority.