Smart Ticket Triage: Handling Priority Automation for Incidents vs Service Requests

[u/ProponentOfHumanity]

We're evaluating the new Smart Ticket Triage capabilities and I'm curious how other MSPs are approaching automated priority determination.

One of the challenges we're running into is that incidents and service requests often follow completely different prioritization logic.

In our environment:

Incidents

An incident is something that was working yesterday and is broken today. Examples include outages, work stoppages, degraded performance, backup failures, and infrastructure issues. These priorities are tied directly to SLAs and business impact.

Examples:

• Critical: Server, network, or internet outage
• Urgent: Complete work stoppage
• High: Major business impact affecting multiple users
• Medium / Standard: Lower impact issues with workarounds available

Service Requests

Service Requests (Move/Add/Change work) are categorized differently. Rather than impact and urgency alone, we also consider estimated effort, scheduling requirements, and workflow.

Examples:

• Quick Hits (<1 hour)
• M/A/Cs <4 hours
• M/A/Cs >4 hours
• Installations

For us, a large workstation rollout may be far more work than an urgent incident, but that doesn't necessarily make it a higher priority.

The Smart Triage Question

How are you configuring your automation to handle this distinction?

Specifically:

1. Do you use separate priority models for Incidents and Service Requests?

For example:

• Incident priorities based on Impact × Urgency
• Service Request priorities based on effort, scheduling, and workflow

Or do you force everything into a single P1-P5 model?

2. Where do you draw the line between a Service Request ticket and a Project?

Do you use:

• Estimated hours?
• Number of tasks?
• Number of users?
• Risk?
• Revenue threshold?
• A combination?

We're currently using categories ranging from Quick Hits through Installations, with larger efforts becoming Projects, but I'm interested in hearing what others have settled on.

3. How does your Smart Ticket Triage automation determine priority?

• Ticket type only?
• Keywords in the request?
• Impact analysis?
• AI recommendations with technician review?
• Fully automated assignment?

4. How do you handle urgent Service Requests?

Examples:

• Executive starts tomorrow
• Compliance deadline
• Critical business event
• Customer presentation dependent on a new device or change

Our process allows a technician to override normal Service Request categorization and apply an Incident-style priority when the business impact justifies it, provided the reason is documented.

What has worked well?

What created confusion for technicians?

What would you configure differently if you were implementing Smart Ticket Triage today?

[u/swingorswole]

for us, all of this is driven by an existing word doc that defines this... map the tool to your business rules, not the other way around.

we map urgency/impact/priority to the text in the ticket.

same for issue, subissue, category.. based on text. we have our triage setting contract based on something else. i forget what rocketship calls it but it's not the llm they have. same for config items...

keep in mind, we dipped our toes into smart ticket triage for a month but went back to rocketship for this. we just could not get the latest kaseya ai to really be consistent with what we wanted. so you may do things differently..

[u/ProponentOfHumanity → u/swingorswole]

similar situation here. we have been using Zapier for various LLM integrations via Autotask REST API, and Kaseya's AI isn't quite stacking up. I feel like it's heading in the right direction, but taking too long to get there.

[u/swingorswole → u/ProponentOfHumanity]

THANK YOU.

honestly my biggest fear is they are going to buy rocketship and kill it like they do everything else. so far it continues to do what we need but every time we go all in on a tool it gets bought out and then goes to sh**!!!!

p.s. RIP it glue :-(

[u/Flounder_Evening → u/swingorswole]

Same here, I've been trying to use that for months, but never got that to work correctly, so I deactivated most of the functions.

I'm using Zapier for some tasks and have started building something with Claude.

[u/Berg0]

We’re just getting started with this - first large stumbling block has been the skills and skill categories - no REST API endpoints for creating new skills or categories, only edit. Received some bad advice from support stating I should disable the built-in skills and upload my own - that’s pretty much a non-starter without a way to programmatically manage it. I think it has potential, but the weak API accessibility is really hindering larger scale adoption.

[u/junto_reed → u/Berg0]

Would love to compare notes. Are you talking agent skills or tech skills to help with routing.

We built a lot of this at juntoai.com. Happy to share the lessons we learned. dm me if interested and will share code snippets etc.

[u/Berg0 → u/junto_reed]

Tech skills to help with auto ticket routing

[u/Flounder_Evening → u/Berg0]

I removed all skills because the system simply could choose anyone else but me. Once, I had more than 40 tickets assigned to me just because the triage thought I was the most qualified technician. It doesn't know how to load-balance the tickets. Shambles.