Our organization is required to provide support and product performance metrics. The product support metrics center around operational availability and rely heavily on downtime reported through the ticket. However, the ticket duration does not (and should not) represent the time that the client system was down. Also, not all tickets will have reportable downtime.
So, it would be useful feature for us to have the ability to capture periods of time (subset of the ticket) that the client's system was unavailable for their use. Optimally, a point and click method of selecting start and end outage events would be provide the best flexibility and ease of use for the varied tickets we service. For example, a ticket could default the outage start as the date/time of the ticket Open status. The technician could then, after fixing the problem, select the outage end as the ticket Resolved status, a calendar/clock time, a current time hack function, a date/time slider or even a field to enter the total number of hours. All these options would cause the calculation of the ticket downtime duration and display within the ticket itself.
Downtime date could then be extracted and reported instead of an intermediate step of using Excel to compute durations.
