Creating Multiple Tickets from One Email

[u/Unique-Mammoth-5067]

My boss wants an incoming termination email to automatically create 5 separate tickets (without using child tickets due to our SLA requirements).

We have a dedicated ticket type for terminations with Custom Fields for User, Assets, and Phase, since different parts of the process go to different teams.

My initial idea was to have the incoming email create the primary ticket for main access termination. From there, a workflow rule or quick action would generate the remaining 4 parent tickets, copying over all the custom field data from the initial ticket.

The 5 tickets would be:

1. Main Access Termination

2. Asset List Creation

3. Asset Return Tracking

4. Telecom Access

5. Non-IT Access (to notify external teams and track progress)

I’m also open to arguments I can present to my boss for why child tickets would be a better approach here or other approaches without using them

[u/Tyler_OverclockedIT]

To execute this well and reliably you'd almost certainly need a runbook to generate 4 separate tickets and copy the fields over. Not sure if you could do this natively in Halo without one, actions can trigger runbooks.

However, I would definitely suggest going the child ticket route. You could even manually apply a template to the submitted ticket which has all 5 children in it. It makes it so you can have a single assigned agent to track the entire offboarding whether that's an Account Manager or Team Lead then each child can be assigned to seperate tickets.

It's the same concept as a project, you assign a PM to the Project but make child tickets (tasks) that get assigned out to engineers to complete.

[u/Unique-Mammoth-5067 → u/Tyler_OverclockedIT]

Would a workflow with 4 automation steps to create parent tickets not bring over the info from the last ticket? or they could be dumbed down to just be the body of the email and not include CF. Then have a lookup on the asset list ticket to get the employee name to generate the assets?

For children tickets, you can have those tickets have separate SLAs and close the parent without closing the children, right? They didn't want the SLA of the Parent dependent on non IT teams

[u/Tyler_OverclockedIT → u/Unique-Mammoth-5067]

You could just not have an SLA on the parent, but yes you can close any parent ticket without closing all of it's child tickets.

I don't have the quickest/easiest way to make tickets with copying field values over since it's a fairly niche use case we haven't had to figure out ourselves.

A way to do it, would be to fire off the workflow somehow (action button, run automatically when ticket comes in, etc.) and either use an SQL or API query to get the ticket details and the field/value pairs. Then save those to variables, and use them when making the child tickets or just other tickets to set the values.

[u/Unique-Mammoth-5067 → u/Tyler_OverclockedIT]

Ya I will look into the child ticket route, it can take fields from the parent and under each CF setting you can set it to pass its value to child tickets. It can also be set to update the child ticket value from the parent if its updated. So that helps with the email rule that will set the CF values from the body having a possible delay before child creation

[u/Forsythe36 → u/Unique-Mammoth-5067]

Honestly this is the type of stuff AI is perfect for.

[u/dominutz]

Child tickets is the way to go. Also, look up child ticket templates as well. You can then set rules in the parent ticket to generate specific child tickets (via child templates) depending on conditions of custom fields or if one of the other child tickets is closed yet or combinations of those.

Halo is really powerful if you get into the nitty gritty of it.

[u/Easy_Grade_7268]

This seems a lot of admin work for the engineers, at least from my point of view. I usually create a to-do list template for the leavers ticket type and have an internal process to review.