Owners and owner groups

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Each ticket (incident, problem, or service request) can be assigned to an owner or owner group, who is responsible for processing the ticket, interacting with the originator, and acting as the contact person for any issues related to work that is done to resolve the ticket.

An owner or owner group can be assigned in a number of ways, including:
  • By applying a ticket template
  • By a workflow or escalation
  • Through the user interface, by selecting the Select Owner or Take Ownership action in any of the ticket-based applications.
  • By enabling Automatic Assignment on an incident (Incidents application).

Typically, you follow an assignment process that initially assigns an owner group, and later assigns an owner. For example, for some types of incidents, you might apply a template that assigns an owner group. Later, a member of that group takes ownership of the ticket and completes the processing of the ticket. When that group member takes ownership of the incident, the group member becomes the owner.

The ownership of a ticket can change several times during its lifecycle. A new owner or owner group can be assigned at any time before the ticket's status is CLOSED. You can see the sequence of owners and owner groups by using the View History action.

Automatically assigning owners and owner groups to incidents

When Automatic Assignment is enabled for an incident, if the owner specified in the Owner field does not take ownership of the incident within a specified period of time, the owner group specified in the Owner Group field is then assigned. The ONCALLASSIGN method searches the owner group and assigns an owner based on their sequence in the group, calendar availability and workload. It continues searching for an owner from that group until ownership of the incident is taken and processing begins.

The system property pmcom.ticket.simultaneous.ownerandownergroup must be set to a value of '1' to allow an owner and owner group to be simultaneously specified on an incident. This is required for automatic assignment of owners. In the current release this system property is enabled. For users upgrading from a previous release, the default value is '0', and an administrator must set this system property value to '1' to enable automatic assignment of owners to incidents. See Configuring the product for more details.