Report to show updates by someone other than the Assigned To and System

[sheree_kenner]

Hello all,

I used to have a report at a different company that would show the Assigned To all ticket updates made by someone other than themselves or system, so they'd know an update arrived and needs to be reviewed. 

I've tried multiple ways but cannot seem to reproduce the report. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Sheree

[Uncle Rob · Accepted solution]

You need 2 tools.  One is the "is different from" operator.  Next, you need to understand that you can't compare assigned to and updated by fields.  Assigned To is a reference.  Updated By is a system generated string.  Thus you need to dotwalk to the Assign To's user_id, which is the only thing that might match Updated By.

When using the "is different from" you MUST express it in the order of Assigned To.User ID - is different from - updated by.  If you start with updated by it will filter out the assigned to column and you can't dotwalk through it.

[sheree_kenner]

Thank you. I believe that will work. However, I hit another snag. The updated by comes up as the user's email account as opposed to username or ID. I've tried several things like filtering out everything following "@" in the email address. Think it may be something our SN developers may need to weigh in on to complete. I've saved your response as accepted as it did work up to that point. I appreciate your time and help. Thank you.

[WillFi]

I'm having a similar issue. I am looking at something like "updated by -> does not contain -> @mycompanydomain.com" to attempt to isolate tasks not updated by any engineer. 
When i do "does not contain", and then "does contain" to test the condition in a list view, I get both false positives and false negatives. This sort of thing continues to blow my mind, that tracking something simple like updates by humans, or the system, are so (seemingly) difficult
If i figure it out i'll reply here.

[WillFi]

Looks like "updated by" is catching us out, as it's a single point-in-time value, it should really be called "last updated by" to remove confusion.

@sheree_kenner If you report on anything in the "updated by" field, just know that if someone/something other than the assigned_to User updates the task, then a system update occurs, say a task is put in pending and then communication from a User kicks it back into work in progress..... That task will be gone from your report/visualisation because the system will be the latest thing to update the task, in this case the state change update.

Unless @Uncle Rob knows something I don't. I actually really really want to be wrong here.