Dear all,

We have a use case where we would like to monitor trouble tickets that remain unanswered for too long a period of time (e.g. 2 days).  Every person takes the responsibility of a (number of) queues.  When that person isn't in the office, responsibility is transferred to someone else.  This is error prone, and to avoid that any trouble tickets would slip through the maze, and remain unanswered for a long time, we would like to have some means of monitoring that.

Until now I've found two approaches:

Ticket escalation
  http://doc.otrs.org/2.0/en/html/x1327.html
It seems to be more intended to make sure the responsible for a queue doesn't forget to answer a ticket, by for example only displaying the escalated tickets to him/her.  But I haven't found a way to query tickets that are currently in escalation, so that this can be monitored externally.

Ticket state approach
If you make sure that every ticket that is answered is in some pending state (e.g. pending auto close or pending reminder), you can query the new and open tickets to figure out if any tickets remain unanswered.  Consider for example this scenario:
  1. a customer opens a trouble ticket (ticket is new)
  2. an agent replies (ticket is pending auto close)
  3. the customer replies again (ticket opens up again)

We want to query the new or open tickets since the last activity (number 3), not since the ticket was created (number 1). So we're not able to query tickets for which the inactivity is larger than a given time period.

If any of you can provide any insight or tips on how to achieve this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a lot,
Stijn