Handle Duplicate Tickets setting – Auto Close Tickets

In many situations, conditions cause multiple tickets with the exact same content to be opened on the system. This is a normal situation, and the you can typically handle this situation by addressing each individual ticket as a separate incident, fixing this problem at the source. The Auto-Learn function, discussed in a previous section, reduces the number of tickets opened on the system by adjusting the thresholds of alerts up or down, thereby increasing the thresholds for those alerts that are commonly opening tickets.

If you need to modify this behavior so that each ticket opened on the system is unique, you can enable the Auto-Close Duplicate Tickets setting, 

found on the Tickets > Config > Parms screen. When this setting is enabled, the system operates as follows:

1. When a ticket is automatically opened, all the open tickets for the same day as the ticket are automatically inspected by the system.
2. If an earlier ticket with exactly the same content is found, that earlier ticket is closed when the new ticket is opened.
3. The closed ticket has a resolution automatically added, indicating that the ticket is a duplicate, and has been closed.

The effect of this operation is that all the tickets on the Open screen are unique, and the most recently opened ticket is at the top of the list. A history of tickets can be found in the Closed tab of the system.

The following special caveats apply:

1. Only tickets that are automatically opened by the system are de-duplicated. Duplicate manual tickets can be opened on the system (through the AddNew option on the Ticket screen).
2. When a ticket is automatically closed by the system due to a duplicate ticket, any action associated with the closed state is not executed. This reduces the amount of e-mail on the system and other actions.
3. The auto-closed tickets must have the same day as the new ticket. The Auto-Close Duplicate Tickets function does not span more than one day and only operates on the current day. Duplicate tickets can exist for different days, but only one duplicate ticket per day.
4. The exact same content for the ticket is required. If you have inserted a variable (such as the related message) into the alert message, the entire ticket content must precisely match. In particular, if you insert the ticket UID as part of the alert message, that ticket is never duplicated (because the UID is always unique to the ticket).
5. Ticket actions are often executed when a ticket is opened, hence the number of opened tickets might not correspond to the number of e-mails on the system.
6. No check is made of the related messages for a ticket. Only the main ticket content is checked. Hence, the related messages for an automatically closed ticket might be different than the currently opened ticket. This might require inspection of closed tickets on the system.