RT Glossary of Terms

Ticket: The record of a problem report. Tickets have metadata attached to them such as an owner, status, and queue. (Casetracker equivalent: Case)

Queue: A category under which a collection of Tickets are grouped. For instance, you might have the right to create, delete, and comment on Tickets in the Help Desk queue, but only the right to comment on Tickets in the Network Installs Queue. (Casetracker equivalent: Category)

Requestor: The person who generated the case. This could be a client as in Casetracker terms, or a consultant who generates cases on behalf of others. (Casetracker equivalent: Client)

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. (Casetracker equivalent: none)

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 generated 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 copies of comments and is also allowed to work on the Ticket.

Custom fields: Database fields that your organization can make up according to its needs. (Casetracker equivalent: subcategories)

History: The descriptive content of the ticket. Facets of Ticket history could 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. (Casetracker equivalent: History)

Types of History entries are:

Reply: (also called Correspondence) Public entry that a Requestor can see (Casetracker equivalent: History).
Comment: Private note for staff not visible to the Requestor. This is useful when you want to be tactful but still convey important information. (Casetracker equivalent: History Entry marked “Private”)

Status: The state of a Ticket’s progress (Casetracker equivalent: Status)

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 the staff's responsibility and is not going to be resolved, but needs to be recorded in the system.
Deleted: The Ticket never should have been in the system, e.g., spam

Owner: The person responsible for the Ticket and its resolution. Each Ticket can have only one owner. (Casetracker equivalent: 'Assigned to' or connected consultant)

Privileged/Unprivileged Users: A privileged user is someone who is eligible to see and update tickets in RT. (Casetracker equivalent: Consultant). An unprivileged user is someone who may only view their own tickets via the Self Service interface. (Casetracker equivalent: Client who is not a consultant)

Relationships: A Ticket that is linked to another Ticket or to external items like URLs. For example, work ticket #99 cannot be completed until work on Ticket #100 is completed. (Casetracker equivalent: none)

Types of relationships 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.
Child: A sub-project of a parent.

Scrips: Are custom notifications that will automatically take a specified action in response to specified condition(s). For example, you could have RT notify the requestor when a ticket is resolved.

Templates: Customizable chunks of text that define the format of email messages sent by Request Tracker. Can contain dynamic content - data fields and even custom logic.

Self Service: The name of the Web interface that Requestors use to view Tickets and create Tickets. (Casetracker equivalent: Customer Interface)

Priority: The level of importance assigned to a Ticket. It is represented on a numerical scale from 0-99, with 99 being the highest priority.

Final priority: Make a Ticket's priority increase or decrease as its due date draws closer. (Casetracker equivalent: none)

(last modified: November 7, 2005)