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

[Kevin Falcone]

On Jun 8, 2009, at 12:54 PM, Kenneth Marshall wrote:

> 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.

The RT::Action::LinearUpdate module has a different update algorithm,
but takes a few arguments, including one to stop recording Transactions
and another to stop updating LastUpdated

You can read about the algorithm and the arguments in the POD of
the action module

-kevin