Overview
Knowing which groups or agents have been previously assigned to a task is paramount, but there is no need to customise your instance for that. For some reason I have seen many times customers creating new fields in tasks to track these events. However, there are Out of the Box (OOB) metrics that do that for you automatically. Let's have a look at these metrics to help you avoid unnecessary customisation.
Assignment metrics
Under "All > Metrics > Definitions" you can find all types of metrics created in the system. You can either use the OOB ones or create your own so that you can track behaviours in the system without having to create extra fields at the task level.
Once you click there you can see a decent set of OOB metrics, but for this specific case you need to look for the ones called "Assignment Group" and "Assigned to Duration":
These metrics not only track the groups and people these Incidents have passed through, but also the duration the Incident was assigned to them for. These OOB metrics can be cloned for other tasks, such as HR Cases, CSM Cases, Problems, Changes, etc... let's see how easy it is.
Adapting the OOB metrics to your specific use case
Once we open any of these two metrics mentioned above, we can see there's a field called "Table" that allow us to reference another table. All we have to do is select another table and ensure the field keeps pointing to the Assignment Group or Assigned to depending on which one we have open. Then we right click atop and do "Insert and Stay" not to replace the OOB metric.
Checking the data being tracked
Under each Metric Definition you can find a related list pointing to all Metric Instances that tells you which data is being tracked, representing in the "Value" field the Assignment Group/Assigned to in our case, the start date when the assignment changed, the end date when such assignment finished, if at all, the duration of this assignment (end-start) and the ID pointing to the task, in this case an Incident.
Bear in mind the definition will contain all Metric Instances for all tasks. If you want to focus on a specific task you should go to "All > Metrics > Instances" as shown below:
In there you can filter based on the Metric Definition and Task you want to focus on:
Bear in mind you can report on this table called "metric_instance" so that you can rely on such data to take your own decisions.
I hope this article helps reduce customisation and focus on reusing OOB features. If you like my article please share and like 👌
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