CA Service Management

Has anyone using the Auto Close feature in Service Desk (12.5 or 12.6) experienced a situation where a Request was set to a resolved status, Auto Close did insert a record in to the Activity Log that "Automatic closure will occur at: MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS ", but the Request never closed, just stayed in the previous resolved status indefinitely? Or, have you experienced Requests set to the resolved status on initial and Auto Close never triggering? We have had both of these scenarios happen a dozen times in the last 6 months (out of 25,000 + requests\incidents that autoclosed correctly). We are on SDM 12.6 but did have this happen other times while we were on SDM 12.5.

Thanks!

-fred

ftucker wrote:

Has anyone using the Auto Close feature in Service Desk (12.5 or 12.6) experienced a situation where a Request was set to a resolved status, Auto Close did insert a record in to the Activity Log that "Automatic closure will occur at: MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS ", but the Request never closed, just stayed in the previous resolved status indefinitely? Or, have you experienced Requests set to the resolved status on initial and Auto Close never triggering? We have had both of these scenarios happen a dozen times in the last 6 months (out of 25,000 + requests\incidents that autoclosed correctly). We are on SDM 12.6 but did have this happen other times while we were on SDM 12.5.

Thanks!

-fred

Hello Fred,

There have been a few reports of "intermittent" issues. You may like to log a Support issue - there may be verbose logging that could be useful for tracking the problem in more depth.

There are some areas that you could look into first, as most intermittent issues, aren't.

* Mandatory fields may stop Auto-Close. (For an intermittent problem, not likely. But may look intermittent if the change occurred between the ticket generation time and the resolution.)
* Customised SPL code can interfere.
* "Resolved" Status (or other) is not with the default attributes of that Status. Flag is that the Incident does not have a "Resolved Date."
* Child tickets still being active if option leave_children_open not installed.
* Auto-Close may use Regular Workshift. So results may not be as predicted if customer has different or no workshift.


Hello Everyone Else,

Sites that use Auto-Close - please contribute!

Thanks, Kyle_R.

Hi Fred,

I agree with Kyle. Check the items he mentioned...also see below:

- If you are using status transitions, check that there is a transition defined from Resolved to Close.

- If Multi-Tenancy is enabled, make sure there is a non-tenanted Auto-Close as well. The OOTB behavior is that if tenant specific Auto-Close definition is not there, the system will look for the non-tenanted (public) auto close.

- Spel-code can easily break this feature. I worked on an issue where customer had enforced that a ticket cab only be updated by a member of the group assigned to the ticket. Since auto-close is done by the System_AHD_User, auto close was failing all the time. If there are custom spel-codes in place, may be worth disabling them temporarily to verify if there is no interference from these.

- Are there any error you see in the logs that related to auto-close, Support may be able to point you in the right direction?

Kind Regards,
Brian

Hi Fred,

Did the information provided answer your question? If so please mark the appropriate posts as Accepted Solution.

Thanks!
Chris

Hello Everyone,

I thought I'd flag another root cause of "Auto Close not working." It's not related to Fred's case in this thread, but adding it here as others may search on "Auto Close."

It is also instructive in illustrating the trouble-shooting advice "Check the plug." That is, don't eliminate the obvious.

In this case, one instance was logged a year ago and closed out without root cause being identified as a "one off problem." (They rarely are, are they?)
A new issue with escalation was opened with this description:

-------------------
We are finding a number of tickets where the Auto Close function is not working correctly. The tickets are put in Closed Requested status, which sets them as resolved and should trigger an Auto Close event. Sometimes, the Auto Close is not set and sometimes it is set but the ticket does not close.

We had a previous case opened on this but a cause was not found. At that time, we were looking at only 1 ticket.
This is now much more severe. 
-------------------

Where would you check next? The cause was [i]not one of the ones included in this thread.
.
.
.

Here is how the trouble-shooting continued:

-------------------
Had a remote session with client.

We tracked down the specific Incident in the act_log table and it showed us that the auto closue happened exactly after the change of status to close requested. 
-------------------

So a useful trouble-shooting idea to check the locations that things write under normal circumstances.

Which led to the root cause:
-------------------
On further research found out that the analyst's manually edit the activity logs to change the dates and time spent, which we assume caused this Issue that was not the auto close not working, It was just changed on the log and showed a different date than it actually happened.
-------------------

In other words, the Auto Close was working fine, but the Activity Log had been edited and this obscured this.

Time to find the problem? Around a week, including files going back and forth.


The moral of this story: Check the plug.

Service Desk Manager is by default an "open" system which gives a lot of authority to users, which is then scaled back. Sometimes, users will use this in unexpected ways.

Thanks, Kyle_R.


[size=1]Edit: Credit for solving the above issue goes to a clever chap called Sergio. I just shamelessly copied from his notes.[size]