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In my past experience in IT, the ticketing system basically doubled as an aggregated event log, and it was a legitimately good use case. The monitoring software we ran on our thousands of client workstations and servers was extremely powerful and could capture any conceivable metric to use as a trigger for auto-generating a ticket.

So, a lot of tickets generated would simply just be data reports with some info dumped in the ticket description, designed to be auto-closed but possibly useful later as an easily-accessible timestamped reference to some data.

Lots of other auto-generated tickets were "probably not an issue but it should pass over the eyes of someone knowledgable about this server/network" tickets. Like Windows Event Log error roundups, CPU usage spikes, or specific triggers that were set up in the aftermath of some catastrophe to help preemptively avoid a repeat incident.

Anyway, tickets are a great "first line of filtration" where you can take a massive ingest of all different kinds of data (hardware metrics, system logs, network activity), apply meaningful human context ("This pattern could be a sign of xyz"), and store it in a unified database. With that use case, it's easy to imagine a company with millions of customers and millions of servers producing millions of tickets.

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I've never seen a ticket system used as just as dumping ground for data in auto-closed tickets. Seems like there would be better solutions for that, particulary for data you want to find later (in my experience, the search capability of ticket systems varies from poor to "don't bother, you won't find what you're looking for")

Anything else, that needs a human to interpret or take action on, yes, ticket systems get extremely wide usage.

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That makes sense, but a part of me is wary of introducing noise at such a scale and drowning out whatever signal remains.

Also ticketing systems in my (very) limited experience tend to be bloated pieces of software, so that adds a fun dimension to it.

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When you’re enterprise size, every request needs a ticket otherwise it didn’t happen
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Exactly. For folks working at smaller companies, think of it as "if you'd Slack someone to ask them to do something, that's a ticket" just purely because Slack doesn't scale to dozens of people needing to figure out which person even needs to get messaged in a given minute of the day.
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It's that, and you also want audit trail. But there's also processes for the sake of processes at Enterprise so a good % of these tickets aren't really needed but you need to file them to follow the process.
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Yes, easily. I work for a "small" org in Amazon and it has more than 100,000 tickets a month. And it's a small fish in terms of number of tickets. As another commenter pointed out, tickets are used for basically everything administrative.

I checked just for fun and there are actually a LOT LOT more than 92M tickets in the past year.

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yes, there's a ticket for EVERYTHING. people have tickets cut in their names even decades after they've left
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At my company we also do the same every request to engineering (alarms, security, bug, customer support escalation) gets a ticket.
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i mean there's even tickets cut if you need IT to fix a laptop or assign you a locker or unlock the code on your desk ped.

heck, there's even a ticket if the office toilet is clogged

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It really helps. Tickets are cheap and persistent. Breezing by my office or shooting me a DM is cheap and ephemeral. I’m just going to respond with “do me a favor and put that in a ticket thanks” anyway
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I once had to raise a ticket for a double AA battery for my mouse. This sort of stuff frustrated me enough to start my own company.
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What does your company use for ticketing?
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Just spreadsheets for the time being. I think irrespective of the tool it's more the mindset for me. What is too small to have meticulously documented versus a general bucket. Also what becomes too big to not track on a ticket anymore but via project governance.
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SqueakDesk
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Ah! You must be that energy harvesting mouse company.
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Were there tickets for tickets too?
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Yes, plus let's close this ticket and open a new one so that the KPIs look solid.
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If it works it ain't stupid. Big companies desperately need traceability and ownership. Way too many bullshitters playing politics, being loud on meetings etc but very little actual output.
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In some big companied many core corporate teams which hate that level of transparency and build their own opaque systems. I've seen this for departments like IT, HR, legal, etc.

I'd rather have tickets for everything and full transparency except for confidential info.

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Im a huge believer in transparency. But I also understand why, in a big company, people don’t like it. It’s very easy for metrics to be weaponised by political players who are out for themselves.
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Perhaps killing the need for tickets will be the real value unlock of llms. (Kidding! Kind of)
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Well there is the UFO/Bigfoot/Poltergeist crowd.

If you dont fully pay attention to their theories about what they think is the reason for the suspicious stain on the ground in the parking lot, the queue is going to get flooded. If your Boss belongs to that club oh man god say the division.

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it is a corporate mantra many of us want to forget. it also functions as a response to any request.

“submit a ticket!”

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Well if they use VPN point to point connections managed by AWS they'll get an email per week until they die for each VPN instance from AWS that they need to put in trash so I understand them.
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