I am looking at apps to use for managing tasks in an Ops only environment where the agents and customers are generally the same people.

Two example scenarios would be:

Provision a New Server –

1. SA submits a request to the CM people to stand up a new box.
2. The CM is approved and the ticket is assigned to the SA
3. The SA submits tickets to the network and infrastructure teams for a rack location, switch port, and an IP address.
4. The network and infrastructure teams provide the info and the SA completes the task.

NOC incident response:

1. The monitoring systems report a problem.
2. The NOC opens an incident and investigates.
3. The incident becomes an outage.
4. The NOC escalates the incident to an SA to handle.

In the last scenario it would be nice to know when it was changed to an outage and when it was changed back to an incident. The incident ticket must always remain in the NOC queue and perhaps an associated ticket be assigned to the SA.  In the end, all actions must be accounted for.

As you can see, there is no real distinction between ‘customer’ and ‘agent’ since anyone submitting a ticket may or may not be the one actually working on it.

Has this ever been done? If not, what would the level of effort be to implement this?  Also, I see there is a Generic Agent. Could the agent be used to open additional tickets based on the content of the original one, this simulating a kind of workflow?

A.J. Fasano

Enterprise Management Team

Network Solutions, LLC