Priority, Impact, Category, Criticality calculation

[Paulo Tebet]

I am new to OTRS but have some experience with other ServiceDesk products. I as used to have some priority matrix calculation where the priority was calculated based on Urgency (how fast something should be fixed) and impact (how many people are beeing impacted). So when I found the Criticality <-> Impact <-> Priority I thought that it was just that. A way of calculationg the priority based on the Impact and Criticality (another way of calling the Urgency).

But then I´ve noticed that in the Incident creation form, we only have the Impact and the Priority fields!! So where does the the Criticality information comes from?

Then I found another priority matrix calculation: Category <-> Impact <-> Priority . Again, the Ticket form does not provide me any field where I can select the Category, so how can the system calculate the priority??

Even if the Category and Criticality is being defined somewhere else, how would the priority be calculated?? Based on the Criticality or the Category???

I could not find any reference to Category in the OTRS, the only thing that I could find is that Queues are in fact another way of calling the Categories.

I am trying to understand this priority matrix calculation and how is it used.

From my searchings, the priority of the tickets is not used actively anywere in the system. Maybe it is just used for reporting purposes. Is this right, or does the priority influences some aspect of the lifecycle of the ticket?

I saw this topic http://forums.otrs.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=4912 but that wasn´t exactly what I was looking for.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.


Regards,


Paulo Tebet