What is a trouble ticket?

You can compare a trouble ticket with medical report for a hospital patient. A medical report is generated when the patient visits the hospital for the first time. All important data about the patient, such as personal data and facts about medical issues, are stored in the medical report. Each doctor adds information on the illness and any medication to the medical report so that all doctors and the nursing staff can get a quick and detailed overview about the patient's situation. When the patient has recovered and leaves hospital, the medical report is closed and all information is archived.

Trouble ticket systems such as OTRS handle trouble tickets like normal email. The messages are saved in the system. When a customer sends a request, a new ticket is generated by the system which is comparable to a new medical report being opened. The answer to this new ticket can be compared to a doctor's entry in the medical report, a new answer to a change in the clinical picture of the patient. A ticket is finished if an answer is send back to the customer or if the ticket is closed by the system. If a customer sends an answer for a already closed ticket, the ticket will be reopened and the new information will be added. To keep the consistency of all data in the system, every ticket is stored and archived with all relevant information. Since tickets are handled like normal emails, attachments will be stored, too. Notes can be added as additional information to every email. All tickets are stored on the hard drive or in the database of the system. Also additional information like notes, dates, employees involved, working time needed for a ticket etc. are stored. All tickets can be sorted and it is possible to search through all data.