Problem-and-incident tickets are useful when a problem or service interruption is reported by more than one person. For example, when the wireless network in an office stops working, several people might file tickets. You can treat the tickets as incident reports. Instead of handling each ticket separately, you can link the tickets to one problem ticket, and then solve the problem ticket to solve all the incident tickets.
Here's the general workflow:
You must have the ticket Type field available in your ticket form to create this workflow.
- Identify a service interruption or problem that's causing people to file tickets.
- Create your own ticket to address the problem.
- Change the other tickets to incident tickets and link them to your problem ticket.
- Solve the problem ticket.
When you solve the problem ticket, the status of all the incident tickets is automatically set to solved. The comment added to the problem ticket when solved is added to all incident tickets that aren't already solved.
Refrain from solving any of the incident tickets directly. Solving an incident ticket still leaves the other tickets unsolved. Save work by solving only the problem ticket. It automatically solves all the linked incident tickets. When the problem ticket is solved, any empty required fields on linked incident tickets are ignored and the tickets are solved anyway.
To create and solve problem-and-incident tickets
- After identifying a problem that's causing people to file tickets, create your own ticket
describing the problem and set the ticket type to Problem.
- For every other ticket reporting the same problem, set the ticket type to Incident
and link it to the problem ticket.
After you set the type to Incident, a second menu appears that lets you link the incident to a problem ticket.
Make sure to click Submit to update and save the changes to the ticket.
- Return to the problem ticket to view the linked tickets and review the incident
reports.
- When you're ready to solve the problem ticket and linked incidents, add a comment. Note
that the comment you add when solving the problem ticket is only included in unsolved linked
incident tickets.
You may want to use placeholders to personalize the comment for wide distribution. For example:
See Using placeholders.
Use caution when using macros to update problem and incident tickets. See Using macros to update problem and incident tickets. - Solve the problem ticket, then confirm that you want to solve all open linked incident
tickets.
If you decide to reopen the solved problem ticket, the incident tickets aren't updated. They stay solved. If you solved a problem ticket prematurely or if you need to communicate something more to the requesters, you can reopen the incident tickets before solving the problem ticket again. Click the Incidents tab when viewing the problem ticket and bulk edit all of the tickets. Submit the tickets as open and proceed with re-solving the problem ticket.
Related topics
66 comments
Sy Sussman
When
Then
0
DJ Yoder
This functionality works fine for us. However, it doesn't seem that views or reports have any parameters to pull problem tickets that have linked incidents or incidents that are linked to a problem. Or any ability to report on how many linked incidents any given problem has. The only visibility into the association is at the individual ticket level. That added layer of insight is really important for us. Any plans on this for the future or other ways to solve for this other than custom API reports?
2
Roshan George
How can I make the "linked problem" field required? I don't want agents logging an incident without associating with a Problem. It doesn't show up as a field in Admin Centre because I guess technically it's a sub field which is only displayed when Incident is selected as ticket type.
2
Salim Cheurfi
I created a ticket on your behalf, we will get in touch via email.
Best,
0
Federico Olmus
Hello Zendesk Community!
How can we limit the incidents that are proposed before linking a ticket to an incident? We only want to see incidents within the brand of the ticket. Any recommendations?
0
Dave Dyson
I don't think there's a built-in way to do that, so for now I think it's going to need to be addressed via training your agents to verify the brand before assigning an incident to a problem ticket. But can you post your use case to our Feedback on the ticketing system (Support) topic, using this template to format your feedback?
0
Jed Hollander
Is it possible to have an INC ticket, when attached to the Problem ticket, duplicate the fields that are set by the Problem ticket?
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Jed Hollander,
We don't have a native option at the moment for incident tickets to copy the ticket fields of the problem ticket. You may use the API and placeholders to pass field values from one ticket to another, but it’s really manual. It can’t dynamically send a problem ticket’s fields to all incidents. We do have a 3rd party app in the Zendesk Marketplace that you can check out called Ticket Field Copier. Hope this helps!
0
P Johansson
OMIO You want to be paid for nothing, our trains were canceled but you still demand money from us, are you not really healthy or maybe a fake company? It is also not possible to call you or get in touch why? Soon time for a police report against your mafia methods.
0
Dave Dyson
It seems like your correspondence has come to the wrong place! You've reached Zendesk support, and it sounds like you're probably trying to reach someone who *uses* our software to provide support. We make software that companies use to give their customers a way to contact them, but we don't actually provide support for their product, just the channel for communication.
Unfortunately, we are unable to forward your email on so please try reaching them directly from their website!
0
Gualter
Hi
Any updates on changing the view of incidents list? I could benefit of having other columns and grouping cases with custom fields as we do for the normal queue views.
Any issue I can track on this?
Thanks
1
Shannon Kertis
Sadly, this feature is not available yet. But I will be sure to mark this as Product Feedback so it can be reviewed by our Product teams. Thanks!
0
Hawk Swearingen
We just ran into a case in which we want to send periodic updates to the incident tickets straight from the problem ticket, but this isn't available as comments on the problem ticket are only pushed to incident tickets when solving problem tickets.
Will there be any functionality in the future which allows for periodic updates on problem tickets to be pushed to incident tickets?
1
Martin Hoolickin
Hi in future will tasks be able to be linked to problem tickets
I am working to integrate the problem function within our environment and utilise the full functions of problem tickets. At present, we are going to use incidents as a workaround but not all problems will need an incident to fix them - they may need a task - Whether it be a change task or KB Known error task.
I am looking at linking them all together to get greater functionality out of the software
Thanks for your article
Regards
Martin Hoolickin
0
EU|DUB|Ruben Messeguer|TECH
Are you able to add custom taggs to Problem tickets to they get added to the incident tickets?
0
EU|DUB|Ruben Messeguer|TECH
Are you able to update incident tickets in different languages when updating the Problem?
0
Lifen Li
Hello, we have like 9K incident tickets linked to a problem ticket. Is there anyway to easily reopen the incident tickets with one click? It took us 2 hours to set them back to reopen again when we wanted to update the customers.
Will it work if I send a reply in the problem ticket with the problem ticket and incident tickets status being "solved"?
0
gan ganor
I want to create a report that shows the number of problem tickets that will also show me how many linked incidents each problem has. If there is no incident linked, I want that to show as well. I was not able to do so. You can either create a report that shows you the number of problems, or the number of problems that have linked incidents alone.
Ideally, I want a table that looks like this
I have almost everything except for the status and a complete list of the problems (linked and unlinked). Any ideas?
1
Sydney Neubauer
+1 to gan ganor's post
0
Sai Praneeth
Maximum How Many incident Tickets we can attach for one problem ticket
0
Gabriel Manlapig
There is currently no known limit on the number of incident tickets we can add to a single problem ticket. You may then link as many incident tickets into a single problem ticket.
I hope that answers your question. Thank you!
0
Cory Stringer
Is there any way (macro, trigger, automation) that allows for us to update a Problem ticket and push that update to the notes of the related incidents or vice versa?
0
Noly Maron Unson
Hi Cory,
Triggers and Automation do not have any action that directly adds comments/notes on a ticket and a macro needs to be manually applied by an agent to work.
The best way to approach this is by using Webhook. You can connect a webhook to a third-party system that will then push the update you need on the ticket.
Hope this helps.
0
KOLOGIK
When we close a problem ticket, we use a macro which has a placeholder for the Ticket Subject. However, since the closing notification is also added to the incidents, the placeholder in the incident tickets is pulling the problem Ticket Subject and not the corresponding incident Ticket Subject. Is there a way around this when using a macro so that the placeholders trickle down? Thanks!
0
Gabriel Manlapig
I'm afraid that this is not possible at the moment. If you run the macro to close a problem ticket with a placeholder that pulls out the ticket subject, it is expected that it will append the problem ticket subject line.
I suggest submitting a request to our Zendesk Support product feedback page. Here, you may get community support and votes for your request, giving our Product team useful feedback for upcoming Zendesk changes.
Thank you!
0
Alex Chechko
Hey,
If we have multiple incidents from the same requester, once the problem is solved, is it possible to send only one email to the requester instead of multiple emails with the same comment. How can we avoid this duplication?
We can obviously merge the incident tickets from the same requester but we're looking to avoid that.
Thanks!
0
JR Lausin
If you're sending the notification for solved incident via trigger I suggest adding a tag condition on the trigger and manually adding this tag to those duplicate tickets so the trigger will not fire when this specific tag is added to a ticket.
Sincerely,
0
Peter Lynch
The link in the article Full circle: The right way to use ticket status and type is broken - says Oops I don't have permission while I am signed into zendesk help center as a zendesk customer.
0
Mayra
So, we use a lot of scalations - Customer Support creates child tickets to Operations and Product Teams. I wanted to have a trigger that, when the parent ticket would be marked as solved, the child ticket would be solved as well.
I was redirected to this article and from what I understand the back office teams would need to manually fill the type of their child tickets as Incidents and link to the Problem, is that correct? In that case, could they copy the number of the ticket in the field to find the problem? Could all this be automatized when the Support team creates the child ticket?
0
Mike DR
That's correct, in order to auto solve a parent and child ticket simultaneously would be to use the Incidents and link Problem path.
For now there isn't a native way to auto fill the "Linked Problem" field (I also checked our Zendesk APIs here) as there isn't a parameter that would point to which problem ticket they would be linked to.
0