We had a weird problem with one ticket that wouldn’t stay closed.
Yes, this is about the ticketing system workflow shenanigans I wrote about a couple of times earlier this month. Yes, there were more shenanigans.
(more…)Category: Work
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Workflow Redux
As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s adventure, ConnectWise Support called me yesterday just before close of business to explain what went awry. In short: The third condition failed on thousands of tickets because prior to 2016, status changes were stored differently in the database. So the condition for “last ticket status update not more than 1 hour ago” was checking for the new kind of status change flag, not the old kind.
We had almost no way of knowing this would happen, short of memorizing every feature and function change over the course of a decade’s worth of software updates to this platform.
By the by, at one point we hit 3000 open tickets. Fun.
Two upsides: One, this should never happen again (on this particular service board) because, well, we’ve now re-closed all those tickets with the new status change flag. Two, my performance metrics for the month are through the roof:
The other four-digit bar is the Operations Manager who decided to pitch in on the ticket-closing efforts. Do I get a raise for this, boss?
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Workflow Overflow
It seemed like a simple request.
“If a technician closes a ticket without attaching a Configuration (device), reopen it, send them an email, and change the ticket’s status so they know they need to remedy the lack of Configuration before closing it again.”
Cool. I can do that.
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Working As Intended (When Observed)
Ain’t this just the way things go?
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A Diligent Worker I Am
I took today off as a mental-health and personal-projects day, in advance of starting my on-call rotation tomorrow. I needed the break. Technically I need a longer break but I was so busy and stressed out and off-balance this month that I didn’t think to actually apply for time off until… yesterday.
Oh well.
I still got up with the alarm, though. Being on a pill-taking regimen sort of requires sticking to the daily routine; if I sleep through the alarm, my phone’s pill-taking reminder goes off a while later anyway. So I went through the regular start-of-day shuffle: shave, shower, etc.
While in the shower, the solution to a nagging work problem came to me. Because I am who I am, as soon as I got to my computer I confirmed the validity of the idea, then loaded up my work email and sent a message to my boss about the solution.
I get brownie points for that, right? Good. Thanks.
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I Love Making Stuff Work
Most days, I’m just a fix-it man. Someone broke something, or entropy took its toll, whichever: I get the call and I (usually) find a way to fix the problem.
On rare, delightful occasions I get to actually build something, though. That’s the best.
Today at the office (as it were) I replaced the basically-defunct PHP Server Monitor setup with Uptime Kuma, which (if you install one extra piece of software) can send notifications to all kinds of things if a monitored website-or-whatever goes offline. Since our company lives in Microsoft Teams day in and day out, I set it to post alerts to a particular Teams channel. I showed the results to the VP and a couple of relevant coworkers and they’re all happy with it. Excellent!
A couple of hours of just hunkered down, putting a new thing into service, learning its ins and outs, and getting useful results at the end? Absolute heaven.
More of that, please.