Learn in this article what the link types of OTRS / Znuny / OTOBO define and are used to. The link types are:
- Normal
- Child
- Parent
Sometimes you require multiple tickets to solve a common Incident / Case / Issue of your client. For this case it is helpful to have these tickets interlinked in between.
You could merge this tickets into one ticket, but this makes only sense if the same team/group/agent is solving the issue. If you have to coordinate multiple teams/agents it is best to keep these tickets independent, but to link them.
To understand what type of linking to use, it is crucial to understand your current situation.
One case is causing dependent cases
Assume you have a (client) case, which is reporting one issue. But to fix this issue you have to trigger different teams, with different velocity and solving speed. Each team requires a specific communication and merging would be not an option, since you cannot keep an overview of the interdependent cases. Too much theory or too abstract? No issue let us use this example:
Assume a client opens a case that a part of a web application is not working. To analyze and fix case you have to ask following teams for some cases to solve:
- Person or Team who does a client VPN support
- Person or Team who does SSL support
- Person or Team who does web application 1st level support
- Person or Team who does the 2nd level support
- Person or Team who does create the bill for the client
In this case you could now get through and communicate one by one with the team mates. This would be possible in one ticket. But if you want to run this support calls in parallel, you will require to create new tickets for each case. Without linking them you will loose complete control of the case, especially if you have many similar parallel ongoing cases for different clients.
In the given example it would be helpful to have a parent case ticket, which is created by the client. And to have all additional cases you provide to your team mates are individual tickets. And these additional tickets are child tickets of the parent case of the client.
The benefit of this is, that you have on each ticket the link to the parent and thus any agent can easily see the current parent case status along with the child case status.
Additionally you get the benefit, that the parent ticket cannot be closed if any of the underneath tickets is till not close and thus solved.