BigPanda blog

Tips for modern NOCs – easing the pain of ticket creation

So one of your operators gets an alert from Dynatrace showing high latency in a customer facing application, and decides to escalate the issue immediately to the development team. They create a ticket in ServiceNow, tediously copying the description from Dynatrace into the comments section. Meanwhile, another operator gets an alert from SolarWinds reporting a high rate of network timeouts, so another ServiceNow ticket is manually created and routed to the networking team.

The networking team resets a problematic switch, resolving both related issues. But the application team has no idea and they are still out on a wild goose chase.

Sounds familiar? Manual ticket creation can often be both inefficient and painful. It’s difficult enough handling just the barrage of alerts coming in, let alone opening tickets and copy/pasting their details into these tickets only to find out later that the issue has already been solved.

In this post – we discuss a simple way to ease this pain, and share a video on how to do it.

 

A Painstaking, Error-ridden Process 

Manual ticket creation can be a problem for various reasons:

  1. Time and effort: It takes time and effort to create tickets and copy all the relevant alert details into them. High ticket volume can potentially become all-consuming for IT Ops teams, and often by the time tickets are created, they are already out of date.
  2. Errors: Manual entering or copy-pasting of incident details into tickets is an error-prone process, as critical details or context can be missed
  3. Higher MTTR: The more time it takes the service desk to deal with tickets, the higher the MTTR.
  4. Duplicate tickets and worse: Tickets are not always resolved within a minute of being created. As the service desk ticket is waiting in a queue, or even after someone has started to work on it, a duplicate/related incident may often occur and a duplicate ticket created. This results in multiple people working on the same issue, in an uncoordinated manner.

 

The Solution: Automated Ticket Creation 

While you probably won’t be surprised that the answer to most of these issues is automation, you may be surprised by the simplicity of its implementation. Before we discuss the “how to”, let’s go over the three main guidelines we recommend you follow when implementing or searching for an automation solution for ticket creation:

  • Full integration with all monitoring solutions. It’s important to collect and automate the handling of all the alerts created by all your monitoring tools. Partial information in a ticket may lead to inaccurate analysis.
  • Enrichment. Add your tribal knowledge, wiki pages, CMDB info and more to incidents and tickets, to make your operations engineers’ work more efficient.   
  • Bi-directional updates.  Make sure your service desk and incident management tools are bi-directionally updating each other in real time – so that as details are added to a ticket, the associated incident gets updated – and vice versa. This ensures that all parties involved are always up to date and no duplicate ticket is created. 

 

Implementing Automation with BigPanda 

BigPanda allows you to easily implement automated ticketing based on these guidelines.

  • Using its Open Integration Hub, BigPanda seamlessly integrates with your existing ticketing solution (ServiceNow, Jira, BMC Remedy, Cherwell and others) and all your monitoring tools, making it easy to quickly adopt it throughout your IT operations stack.
  • BigPanda also enriches your incidents by integrating with your CMDB, wiki pages and more. 
  • Integration with BigPanda also means full bi-directional communication with the integrated systems, at a click of a mouse.

This short video shows you how automated bi-directional ticketing works in BigPanda:

 

BigPanda is being used by leading enterprises to automate their ticketing. Just two of the many examples include a global leading airline that was able to reduce MTTR by 78% in the process, and a large global media conglomerate that was able to reduce their ticket volume by over 85%.

Want more information about how BigPanda can help your organization? Learn more about us here or contact us for a free demo.