ITNinja

It would be very difficult to figure out if you should exclude weekends, then you'd have to calculate how many weekends to exclude. Also what if someone does extra work on the weekend? That could create a scenario where they close a ticket in negative time.

The way that I have handled this is by implementing a "timer" using a custom field. This timer doesn't run on after hours (or on weekends by example).

An example of a timer . It requires two rules minimum -- one to increment the counters on eligible tickets every 15 minutes. Another to establish the counter when the ticket is changed (created or modified).

I don't have any code handy at the moment on that.

I don't quite understand what the use of your timers are for? Calculating ticket time for business hours?

The ultimate purpose I am working towards is trying to determine as close as I can a true value for the time to resolve a problem for our help desk. There are several inherent problems/variables that need to be considered though when calculating this.

1. How much stalled time is involved, for instance waiting on a customer to respond to a ticket or waiting on management to approve a ticket. Its not a good measurement of time of resolution to include if a customer/user sits on a ticket for three days with no response
2. Ticket time for non-business hours - again its not a good measure to determine avg time to resolution if you include 48 hours of time when neither the tech nor the user are at work to resolve the issue.
3. Account for tech's time working on a ticket - we use the work log entries for this

Its fun/frustrating trying to create a report to show a true avg time to resolve tickets by tech and support team having to take all of these variables into consideration.

Does anyone else out there report on this? If so, what do you do to determine your avg time to resolution/close

The timer adds time while the ticket meets your conditions. E.g. time that at ticket is in an opened state (waiting on ticket owner and not closed). Then you add up said time in a report.

It doesn't help on existing tickets. it only helps for future tickets.

Sounds like you are measuring hours not days so are you a 24 hour shop during the week? If not do you not also need to take into account the time gaps in evenings->mornings?

It sounds like the timers might be a good way to go. Then I could report on time a ticket is in an open status, stalled status, etc.

I assume you use triggers for setting off the timers when status gets changed to x.

Just to clarify, are your counters set up in more of a real-time fashion or do they only change in 15 minute increment values? What I mean is if a ticket is in an opened status for 8 minutes does the timer reflect such or does it only change values in 15 minute increments?

Are the timers visible to the end user in the ticket or is it something that runs in the background?

You would have two rules for one timer. All tickets have a timer -- in a custom field (that could be hidden or not). A subset of that have an active timer (ie qualify for updates). One rule would update the timer as the tickets change -- i.e. operate on a single ticket at a time ad hoc. Another rule would run every 15 minutes on the hour.

When you run your report you either run it during a time when the timers are "off" -- (off really means that no tickets meet the criteria like on a weekend) OR you run it right after a 15 minute (on the hour) interval so your data is as accurate as possible.

I am new to the Dell Kace system and I am in the process of setting up my Service Desk Module. I am very intrested in this feature as well. Actually, I am very surprised that there is not a "Working Hours" setting for this module. That would make this much easier.

Would you be able to post a screen shot of what you are talking about with creating your timers?