Ticketing system

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Transcript PRTG Network Monitor - Ticketing System

PRTG's new ticketing system lets you manage and maintain information about issues and tasks which appear while monitoring your network.
A ticket in PRTG contains information about recent events in your network that need closer attention from an administrator.
You can consider each ticket to be a task for a particular PRTG user.
PRTG can create tickets itself, for example, to inform you that auto-discovery has finished.
Or, users can create tickets for any kind of issue.
You can also configure your notifications to open a ticket when there's a warning or error in your network.
The tickets can be used to keep track of all network-related issues by following the status of a problem and its resolution. Each ticket reports on one particular problem, its status, the steps that were taken to solve it, and which people were involved in resolving it.

So, let's look at the tickets in my PRTG installation, and let's start with a list of all of the tickets:

This list of tickets shows us all of the tickets in the system at the moment. Let's look at the different columns here:

The first is the date that the ticket was last modified. If you'd like to see the date that the ticket was opened, you can open the ticket itself, and you can then see in the Ticket History when it was opened, and what other changes have occurred.
The priority is set to two, by default, but you can change the priority by clicking on the stars here in the list, or inside the ticket itself.
The ticket ID is a unique identifier for each ticket.
The subject is a text description of the ticket
Assigned to shows which user the ticket is currently assigned to.
The status can be Open, Closed or Resolved.

Open, with the page symbol, is pretty clear: that means the ticket is still being worked on.
But what's the difference between closed, with an X symbol, and resolved, with a checkmark symbol?
Resolved means that a user has completed the task in the ticket. Then, another user or the PRTG admin can check that the problem really has been resolved. When the solution has been confirmed, the admin will change the status to closed, which indicates that the ticket is completely finished.

The Object shows which PRTG object generated the ticket, and you can click here to go directly to the webpage for that object.
The Actions that are available for each ticket depend on what status the ticket currently has:

Closed tickets can only be reopened.
Resolved tickets can be edited, assigned to a user, closed, or reopened
And Open tickets can be edited, assigned, resolved or closed

When you click on one of the tickets itself, you see a summary with the same information we just saw in the list.

Then, you can edit the ticket to add information about the task.
When you're finished editing, you might want to assign the ticket to other user, so they can complete the next steps.
Once the tack is complete, you can resolve or close the tickets.

You can sort this list of tickets according to any of the columns by clicking on the name of the column.
To view only tickets that are assigned to you, there's a built-in filter under the Tickets Menu: where you can select "My Tickets", and then select which states you're interested in.
Or, in the list view, you can build more advanced filters using the Filters in the top Bar in the table. You can filter this list based on ticket status, ticket type, who the ticket is assigned to, what object the ticket is related to, or the date the ticket was last modified.

The tickets themselves come from three different sources.

The To Do tickets are created by PRTG to show important system information and in case of specific system events. They are assigned to the PRTG System Administrator user and cannot be turned off. In the list, these To Do tickets appear with "System" as the object.
PRTG creates To Do tickets to let you know that an event has occurred that is relevant to PRTG itself. To Do tickets are generated when

New devices or sensors have been created by the auto-discovery process
A new probe connects to the core and must be acknowledged
A new cluster node connects to the cluster and must be acknowledged
A new version of the software is available
A new report is complete and is ready for review
Or if there are problems affecting PRTG, such as the system has run out of disk space, or there are licensing issues.

The ToDo tickets are assigned to the PRTG Administrator when they're generated, but the administrator can reassign them to other users.
The second source for tickets is the PRTG users themselves. Users can create tickets by selecting Open Ticket under the Ticket menu. Select the relevant probe or device, and type in a subject and comments for this ticket.

You can use this to create tickets for other users, independent of any problems inside PRTG. There doesn't have to be a failure in the network to generate a ticket: you can use this to discuss scheduled maintenance or planned upgrades, for example.
If you'd like to open a ticket about a specific device or a specific sensor, you can also open it directly from the device view, by right-clicking on the device or sensor and selecting "Open ticket"

The third source of tickets is the PRTG notifications. When you define thresholds and notifications for your sensors, you can now also specify that PRTG should create a ticket when a warning or error condition appears.
You define a ticket notification in the Setup menu, under Notifications. There's a new option called "Assign Ticket", which you can now use instead of or in combination with the older options such as email or SMS.
When you select Assign Ticket, you can choose to have the ticket assigned to an individual user or to a user group. You specify the subject of the ticket and the content of the ticket.
You can also specify what PRTG should do when the warning or alarm condition that triggered the ticket clears: you can either have PRTG close the ticket again automatically, or you can leave the ticket open, so that an admin can confirm that the problem has been resolved before closing the ticket.
I'd like to take a minute here to explain that this "assign ticket" option is only for opening tickets inside PRTG's ticketing system. If you already have another ticketing system, you can also open tickets automatically for that external ticketing system.
In this case, however, you don't use the "assign ticket" option. Rather, depending on what kind of input the other ticketing system accepts, you would probably use either an email or execute an HTTP action to open the ticket.
For any of the three kinds of tickets in the PRTG ticketing system, PRTG will send an email to the user to let them know that a ticket has arrived. You can adjust this behaviour under Setup -> User Administration -> User Accounts.

If you scroll down to "Ticket System" you can enable or disable emails from PRTG when a ticket is assigned to that user. If email is ON, the user will receive emails for all tickets that are assigned to that one user, plus all tickets that are assigned to a group in which that user is a member.
If you'd like to change the email settings for several users at once, you can use the multi-edit feature to select all of the users, go to Settings, and adjust the email notifications for all users.

It is also possible to disable the entire ticketing system for user groups, with the exception of the PRTG Administrators group.

To disable ticketing for a user group, go to Setup / System Administration / User groups, and select a group that's not the Administrator group. Under Ticket System Access, you can block this user group from the entire ticketing system.
This could be useful, for example, if you have your customers entered into PRTG as users so that they can view Maps with their information, but you don't want them to create or even to view the tickets that are in the system.

If the user who is logged in does not have access to the ticket system because their user group has been denied access, then the "Ticket" Tab does not appear in the user interface.