How do you track the number of open tickets at a particular date?

[steevels]

I'm trying to do a report based on created, resolved and open. Fairly standard if I want that done for right now, but what if I want to look back to a date three months ago and tell how many open tickets there were on that day?

I'm sure it's really straight forward, but I've been going around in circles for hours now and I can't get it.

[ryanhill]

I'd like to re-state what the OP said and also elaborate as to one reason this is important. OP said: "what if I want to look back to a date three months ago and tell how many open tickets there were on that day?"

If you read it carefully, the question isn't "how many tickets were opened on a day?" but "how many tickets were open on that day?"

So finding out if a ticket was opened or closed isn't the question, but rather what is the TOTAL in the state "Open" ?

A reason for doing this is to be able to plan capacity. If I don't know how many tickets my team has at any particular time, I can't accurately plan what level of resource commitment we can make. Like the OP said, it's pretty easy to find out how many tickets are open right now. But if you want to go back and look at the history, I think we're at a loss.

FWIW the previous system my company used could not produce this information, either. I have an analytics tool I can export data to and get it that way, using formulas, but frankly this is something I expect my ITSM tool to be able to tell me.

[Harald B_]

Hm, are there any news about new features to get this kind of reports?

I think it is very common to show the curve of open tickets (Requested Items, Incidents, Change Requests) in relation to the date, at least on a weekly base in order to get a possible trend.

Example Data (peek every Monday to gather number of open tickets, also store total number of tickets:

CW201: 50 Open Service Requests, 200 in total
CW202: 55 Open Service Requests, 210 in total
CW203: 57 Open Service Requests, 220 in total
CW204: 54 Open Service Requests, 220 in total
CW205: 60 Open Service Requests, 230 in total

These charts have manually sampled data on a weekly base.

It shows on the left the trend of open Change Requests (Active) over the time;
On the right the curve is combined with the closed Change Requests to see the trend of total amount of requests over the time.

I would expect that as a basic feature for reporting.

[DJL2]

Hi Harald,

The only way to generate a running count of open tickets is to configure an Indicator within Performance Analytics which collects a periodic score (daily, weekly, monthly) which is then stored within its tables.  These scores can then be plotted across your timeseries, similar to how you've illustrated.

This type of measurement cannot be done within Reporting as the State field is volatile, ie: it'll change through the lifecycle of a ticket.  Within that context, Reporting will tell you what a tickets current state is - it does not cache, within the application, an audit history of what it was yesterday, last week, last year etc.

But - and as described in my first paragraph - PA does do this, once configured to do so.  The last part of that statement is very important.  Why?  PA will only collect a daily, weekly, monthly score from the point in time it is told to do so.  It is not a time machine however, and you will not be able to retrospectively collect previous states (see my second paragraph for reasoning)

I hope that helps?  It's easy enough to set-up and once in place, removes the manual overhead you've described.

Thanks,

DJL

[RB1112]

Great explanation for a disappointing answer - it's a pretty obvious metric to want to track, especially as it directly reflects the teams ability to cope with demand. @Servicenow, you should be able to do this!

[donrb5]

Would this work?

I think this might work (still trying to figure out how to proof it).

Resolved set to After the date and time desired.

Or Active is True if still open

and finally

Opened set to Before the date and Time desired