Introduction to tickets

Tickets are used to track support issues, service requests, incidents and problems for internal and external customers. They are the primary entities used to manage your help desk.

Each ticket is identified by a unique ticket number which incorporates the date on which it was created and an automatically incremented number. Example: T20230719.0007 means the seventh ticket created on July 19, 2023.

  • Projects are proactive and planned. Tickets are often created in response to a customer issue.
  • Projects consist of a number of possibly interdependent phases and tasks. Tickets are stand-alone, or a series of identical instances of the same assignment.

Tickets can be stand-alone entities, or they can be part of a series.

If you perform the same service for a customer on a regularly recurring schedule, you have the option of creating a series of tickets all at once, rather than creating and scheduling each ticket separately. Refer to Recurring tickets.

You can create several types of tickets:

  • Service Request (default): A request from a user for information, or advice, or for a standard change or for access to an IT service.
  • Incident Ticket: An unplanned interruption to an IT service or a reduction in the quality of an IT service.
  • Problem Ticket: A cause of one or more Incidents.

For detailed information on using and managing problem and incident tickets, refer to Working with problem and incident tickets.

  • Change Request: A ticket describing a significant change that may require approval from other resources and may also be linked to one or more problem or incident tickets. This option is only available if the Change Management feature is enabled. For detailed information on managing change request tickets, refer to Change management.
  • Alert: A ticket created by the Datto RMM remote monitoring integration. The Alert type will be applied to all tickets created in Autotask by the Datto RMM integration. It can also be used for general purposes, whether or not the Datto RMM integration is enabled.

For more information, refer to Selecting a ticket type.

All tickets keep track of:

  • The support or service description
  • The customer and contact it is associated with
  • The resource and/or queue assigned to work on it
  • The billing contract that determines how labor on the ticket will be billed
  • Any work performed, and the current status of the ticket
  • Any charges and expenses associated with the ticket
  • Notes and file attachments
  • The service call the ticket is assigned to, if any

Incident and Problem tickets also keep track of the incidents and problems they are associated with.

Change Request tickets also keep track of change information and approvals.

No. Ticket categories allow you to create customized ticket interfaces, called categories. When a category is applied to a ticket, the ticket displays the fields and data from the category's custom interface. Your company may have different ticket categories that are customized for different workflows. Create and apply a Service Desk ticket category to display the data and fields needed to complete the ticket assignment, without cluttering the ticket with contract and billing information. HR can have its own ticket interface for internal resource onboarding, because they have no need for device and RMM alert fields. The ticket category can even set field defaults and customize field menu options.
Refer to Managing categories.