[RFC] Improve the process of emergency downgrade in the workflow
Request for comments
We currently have a workflow for downgrading emergency tickets: Handling an emergency downgrade. According to my discussion with @jcolyer, this method is not correct as the ticket will still stay in the Emergency form after changing the priority. The process was introduced in the MR gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!121347 (diffs). It would be great to improve this process.
Need
- Quite often we have tickets staying in Emergency form for a long time (more than 1-2 days), and they are handled like regular tickets. Such tickets are visible to everyone at the top of all SGG views. If they are not real emergencies, they serve as a distraction, and it does not make sense to keep them there. We need to figure out an easy way to "downgrade" such tickets to regular ones.
- Following the current workflow Handling an emergency downgrade does not change SLA. As the form is still set to
Emergency
, NRT SLA will still be 4h.
Approach
Find a better way to downgrade emergency tickets. Some ways I can think of:
- Preferred Create a macro that can handle emergency downgrade on its own without applying any manual steps --- Support-Ops confirmed below in this comment that it should be possible
- Figure out how to make changes to existing Emergency ticket - change the field
Priority
fromUrgent
to something else, changeTicket stage
toNRT
, change the form fromEmergencies
to the relevant one, change the fieldSGG
to your group --- If Support-Ops approves the steps, it is probably the easiest way to handle downgrades. - Move to Support-Ops queue using a macro similar to
Incorrect form used
macro --- It is less convenient as it requires additional effort from Support-Ops. - Create a follow-up ticket --- It is even less convenient as it requires manual ticket creation and summarizing the emergency ticket, so it only good at the beginning of the ticket handling.
- Something else?
Benefit
- We will have a simpler and smoother way to downgrade emergency, less manual work and things to think of for on-call engineers.
- Tickets that are not emergencies will not stay at the top of the queue longer than required.
Competition / Alternatives
Leave the current workflow as it is.
Implementation issue: #5846 (closed)
Edited by Alexandr Tanayno