RT Glossary of Terms

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Portions of RT Glossery of Terms are taken from the RT manual © 2003 Best Practical Solutions, LLC and MIT's RT Project Notebook.

Custom fields: Database fields that we, as an organization, can make up according to our needs. Custom Fields can be added to Users, Groups, Tickets, or Ticket Transactions.

Final priority: The priority that a Ticket will increase or decrease to as its due date draws closer.

Group: A set of users. Generally, groups will contain users with something in common. Each group is assigned rights, and each user is made a member of the groups he needs to be in.

History: The descriptive content of the ticket. Facets of Ticket history include: When the ticket was created, how it has changed, and any comments about it or replies to it. Ticket history cannot be changed so be aware that any comments you make about a Ticket are permanent. Types of History entries include, but are not limited to:

Reply: (also called Correspondence) Public entry, typically a summary written with the customer (requestor) in mind, that a Requestor can see.

Comment: Private note for staff not visible to the Requestor. This is useful for conveying important and/or detailed information about the ticket for internal staff use.

Outgoing Email Recorded: A notation that RT sent an email with a link to the email test.

Priority Changed: An escalation of a ticket's priority.

Link: See Relationships

Merge: Permanently combine two Tickets into one Ticket

Owner: The person responsible for the Ticket and its resolution. Each Ticket can have only one owner.

Priority: A numeric value assigned to a Ticket that will determine response time committments.

Queue: A collection of Tickets that have a unique group of users with permission to manage the Tickets. For instance, you might have the right to create, delete, and comment on Tickets in the NOC queue, but only the right to comment on Tickets in the Security Operations queue.

Relationships (aka Links): A Ticket that is linked to another Ticket or to external items like URLs. Types of relationships/links are:

• Depends on: The Ticket can't be resolved unless another Ticket is also resolved.
• Depended on by: The converse of Depends on.
• Refers to: The Ticket doesn't need the other ticket, but it provides useful information to the Ticket referred from.
• Referred to by: The converse of Refers to.
• Parent: A Ticket about a large project or problem that has one or more subprojects connected to it. A Parent ticket may be resolved before its children have been resolved. A Parent ticket can apply ownership, status, and message (comment) updates to its children.
• Child: A sub-project of a parent.
• Super: A Ticket about a large project or outage that has one or more subordinate tickets connected to it. A Super ticket may be resolved before its Sub ticket(s) have been resolved. A Super ticket can apply message (comment) updates to its Sub ticket(s). Replies from its Sub ticket(s) will automatically appear as comments on the Super ticket.
• Sub: A subordinate ticket of a Super ticket

Requestor: The person, typically a customer, who initiates the work request.

Right/ACL: Permission for a user or group to perform a discrete action in RT.

• Rights can be granted for individual groups, for individual queues, or across the whole system.
• Rights can be given to groups, roles (Requestor, Owner, Cc, AdminCc), system groups (everyone, staff users, non-staff users) or individual users.
• Rights can be delegated if permission to do so is assigned.

Severity: The level of importance assigned to a Ticket across C&C workgroups. Severity is a mandatory field that is assigned according to the impact of the problem on users, networks, and systems. Severity is scaled from 1 to 5, with 1 having a significant impact to many users and/or critical systems or networks.

Scrips: Custom notifications or actions automatically taken when a specific condition, which may be comprised of several conditions, is met. If the action involves sending a notification a template is required. For example, you could have RT notify the requestor when a ticket is resolved. Scrips contain three parts:

• Condition: Something that has to happen to activate the scrip, like a ticket being created.
• Action: The thing the scrip does in response to the condition, like notify the ticket's requestor.
• Template: Essentially a form letter that goes along with an action. A simple example could be, "Dear [name of requestor], your ticket has been created and its ticket ID is [this number]."

Squelch: Suppress outbound email to individual Watchers

Status: The state of a Ticket's progress. Status types are:

• New: The Ticket has just been created and hasn't been touched yet.
• Open: The Ticket is getting worked on.
• Stalled: Due to circumstances beyond your control, the Ticket isn't getting worked on right now. It will open again when someone adds a Comment or Reply.
• Resolved: Work on the Ticket has been completed.
• Rejected: The Ticket is not going to be resolved because it is not possible or feasible or is just out of the scope of the staff's responsibilities, but needs to be recorded in the system.
• Spam: The ticket has been identified as Spam and will be purged from the system
• Deleted: The Ticket never should have been in the system and will be purged from the system

Self Service: The name of the Web interface that Requestors use to view Tickets and create Tickets.

Spam Score: A rating system based on content-matching rules that is used to suggest whether a message may be spam. A Spam Score can range between 0 and 100.

Tag: Key word(s) assigned to the Ticket to simplify ad hoc searching of ticket content and context.

Ticket: The record of a problem report or work request. Tickets have metadata attached to them such as an owner, status, and queue.

User: Anyone who interacts with RT in any way. Types of users are:

• Staff User: A user who can be granted rights in the system.
• Non-Staff User: A user who usually has no rights to do things in RT; often a requestor whose account was automatically created when the request was sent.
• RT Agent: Any C&C staff person who works on tickets.

Watcher: Someone who is interested in the work done on a Ticket. You'll find these listed under the People link when a Ticket is displayed. Types of watchers are:

• Owner: The person responsible for the Ticket and its resolution. Each ticket can have only one owner.
• Requestor: The person who initiated the Ticket.
• Cc: Anyone who should get copies of replies that go to the Requestor. This person will see the email but may not have the right to work on the Ticket.
• Admin Cc: Anyone who gets BCC copies of replies and comments.