[rt-users] Escalating priorities and using 'LastUpdated' in searches

[Kenneth Marshall]

On Mon, Jun 08, 2009 at 05:39:58PM +0100, Jason Doran wrote:
> Hi,
> We are currently escalating priorities for all queues each night with a 
> cron job.
> 
> # escalate tickets for all queues
> while (my $queue = $queues->Next) {
> my $queuename = $queue->Name;
> system("$crontool --search RT::Search::ActiveTicketsInQueue " .
> "--search-arg \"$queuename\" ".
> "--action RT::Action::EscalatePriority");
> }
> 
> 
> Now some people are complaing that they cannot look at tickets that 
> haven't been updated in a given time period (by a real person) using 
> 'LastUpdated' in searches, since most tickets have their priority 
> updated every night and there is a transaction: root - Priority changed 
> from?
> 
> Is there a way to ignore transactions of priority change when running 
> queries using 'LastUpdated', or perhaps I should not run the cron job at 
> all. I am not sure that it really provides us with anything at the 
> moment other than being able to sort on priority. What do other people 
> do with escalating priorities and using LastUpdated in searches?
> 
> Regards,
> Jason
> 

Hi Jason,

We initially setup priority escalation nightly as well. And like you
we found that the LastUpdated information was lost. In addition, in
our environment as priorities increased, no additional resources were
actually available to help resolve the higher priority tickets. This
resulted in a large number of tickets with a high priority and often
at the priority cap. So in addition to losing the LastUpdated information,
the use of the priority field to track an issues priority was lost as
well. And one final problem, the additional "noise" priority escalation
transactions also slowed down ticket display as well. I would recommend
not using priority escalation unless you have addressed all of the
problems mentioned above.

Good luck,
Ken