Custom SLA metrics on OTRS?

[ThunderFox]

Howdy guys!

I come here looking for your help on a matter involving OTRS and SLAs.
We use a deployment of OTRS which has been customized for several customers, sharing similar services. So, the services are set-up like this:

Customer1::Services::Service1
Customer1::Services::Service2
Customer2::Services::Service1
Customer2::Services::Service2

And so on.

Now, when trying to set-up SLAs for these services, we would like to have them in such a fashion that you can have a different SLA applied to each ticket, depending on it's priority. So, a ticket with priority P1 would get a different SLA than a ticket for the same service with priority P2, and so on. However, it does not seem that this can be done with OOTB SLA configuration.

Is there any way we can define custom SLA rules that set what they are based on, such as pre-requirements (in this case, the priority of the ticket) and the calculation basis for the SLA (let's say, the time it takes for ticket T001 to move from state S1 to S2)?

Cheers.

[ThunderFox]

No ideas? SLA would seem like it's an important feature to OTRS, but it's not very useful unless you can customize how the SLAs behave.

Cheers,
Hugo

[jojo]

you can use the advanced escalations available for OTRS Business Solution™ customers

[ThunderFox]

Unfortunately I cannot use a commercial solution for this project, so that leaves the OTRS Business Solution off the table.

As an alternative, what *can* be done with the opensource version SLAs? Certainly, even if requires some code to be customized, you should be able to change or add new SLA types and metrics.

[alexus]

You can use ACL for setting Priority-SLA dependencies. As to specific SLA you can get solution via custom reports for specific metric calculation.

[ThunderFox]

Looking at the option of custom reports right now, as it seems escalation will not be a priority or a need, currently.

While looking up the OTRS data model, I just found out that there is no history of ticket status. So some modifications to the database will be required for this to work out. Will keep this updated as I draw a solution to this problem.

[alexus]

While looking up the OTRS data model, I just found out that there is no history of ticket status.

There is no any special "ticket status history". On the other hand if you look closely at the ticket_history table you can find a column STATE_ID. It's not obvious of course but it works.

[ThunderFox]

Thing is, and I've checked this today, some tickets have gone though several states already (let's call them { New; Open; Pending Response; Closing } for good measurement) and the transitions would be:

from New to Open
from Open to Pending Response
from Pending Response to Open
from Open to Closing

These tickets I've looked at currently hold only a single entry in the ticket_history table. So while it would help, perhaps in getting the latest or first state (not sure when the table is written to?) it still leaves out a lot of transitions. The idea behind the custom SLAs is to expand the state machine and get several SLAs to measure the ticket lifespan in some of the transitions.