Someone in the forums recently discovered “overdue” tickets by accident, which was more than enough to convince me ticket response times needed better documentation. First things first, it’s best to not think of response times as a due date on a calendar, more like a reminder for when tickets have gone too long in the Helpdesk unanswered. Keeping that in mind, Cerb4 is designed so that you add response times to individual buckets where all the tickets inside inherit the target times. Considering these are not necessarily hard deadlines it would be a lot of extra work to set reminders for every single ticket.

To configure things, click ‘group setup’, pick a group, and set your ‘Response’ time in hours from the ‘Buckets’ tab.

Now any tickets in that bucket which have not been replied to before the response target, will be “flagged” overdue for you to see. “Flagged” is a bit of a misnomer, in reality overdue tickets are not treated any differently by the Helpdesk. The only noticeable change you will see is in the ‘Updated’ column of your ticket lists. Tickets that are overdue will be red, so if a ticket was updated ‘2h ago’ and that buckets response time is set for 1 hour…

Hopefully red dates serve as little more than a “tap on the shoulder” to get you working on those aging tickets!

-joegeck@wgm