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.
Anyway, the ticket met all of the conditions to avoid both workflows we’ve put into place. Which is to say, it had ticket Type and Subtype (categories, if you like) as well as attached Configurations (17 of them, in fact). So it should not have triggered this workflow:
And yet, somehow, Palpatine returned this one particular ticket (with 17 Configurations attached!) was reopened by the workflow rule. So I started a vendor support ticket about this zombie ticket in our system. Very early on Monday morning, Support created “a copy” of our workflow in order to test the problem.
Well. Kind of.
You’ll be utterly unsurprised to learn that Support’s version of the workflow rule set resulted in nearly 10,000 reopened tickets. Which is what greeted me at 7:30am yesterday when I signed into Outlook and the ticketing system.
It took nearly the entire morning to re-close the tickets, and partway into that process I sent Support an update something along the lines of “you used the word ‘copy’, I do not think that means what you think it means” with a bit of “please don’t touch our stuff again without warning us first” on the side. More than 24 hours later, their response was, basically, “We deleted our workflow copy and look forward to hearing from you.” Which… what?
The ironic conclusion to this saga is that, in fact, the tech whose ticket started this mess off discovered that a couple of the Configurations had issues (one was under the wrong Client, another may have been a duplicate, etc) and once he’d resolved those issues he was able to close the ticket and it stayed closed.
On Friday.
Monday morning’s disaster could’ve been avoided if I’d known about that by end of day Friday so I could wave Support off from tinkering with anything. Fortheloveof…
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