Some weeks ago a customer asked me how to manage 'major incidents' with KACE Service Desk.

For major incident they intend an incident that is the root cause of other incidents. For example the SMTP server goes down and this is related to a lot of tickets that the users are logging about email problems.

The problem is how to put them in relation (sort of father child relation) after the tickets are created. The other requirement was to avoid the usage of processes

I then had this simple idea on how to implement it. Maybe this is not the best way to do it and some aspect of this implementation need to be tested and enhanced but I think this can represent a good starting point.

The idea is to add a check box that the queue owner will use to mark an ticket as 'major incident' and a single select field that the queue owner can set to refer a ticket to a major incident.

The last part step is to close all the tickets that are referring to a major incident after it is closed.

These are the steps I followed.

1-Modify the queue layout to add the two fields. In this example I used the fields CUSTOM_1 and CUSTOM_2 

Ticket Layout section:

Custom Fields section:

For the selected values I used this simple query:

query:SELECT ID FROM ORG1.HD_TICKET WHERE CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUE0 = 1

So I populate the dropdown single select only with tickets that are marked as major incident

2-Now we need a way to close the tickets associated to the major incident if the major incident is closed

To achieve this result I create a simple custom ticket rule that is executed ever hour. For sure there were much better and complex ways to do achieve the same result but I had in mind the simplicity when I created it. 

The select query of the ticket is the following:

SELECT A.ID
FROM
    ORG1.HD_TICKET AS A,
    ORG1.HD_TICKET AS B
WHERE
    A.CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUE0 != 1 /* The ticket is not marked as major incident */
    AND A.CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUE1 != '' /* The ticket is related with a major incident */
    AND A.CUSTOM_FIELD_VALUE1 = B.ID /*The ticket is related with a specific major incident */
    AND B.HD_STATUS_ID = 2 /* The major incident is closed */

The update query is the following:

UPDATE ORG1.HD_TICKET
SET HD_STATUS_ID = 2 /*Set the status to closed */
WHERE HD_TICKET.ID in (<TICKET_IDS>)

I checked the "Results are tickets, add a comment to each one" and I added a comment to warn the submitter why the ticket was closed.

Things to improve:

• The single select drop down should be able to select from currently open major incidents (but sometimes may even be useful to associate tickets to major incidents already resolved)
• If you have multiple queues you may want to add some logic to act only on a specific queue

Caveats:

• I do not guarantee that this implementation is fully working...it is only an idea that can be developed and improved
• Custom ticket rules are very powerful & potentially dangerous if they are wrong so they need to be tested well and adapted to your environment...test them well before to activate them!!