RT Essentials

Appendix A. Glossary

Like all technologies, RT has its own lingo, and understanding RT begins with understanding this lingo. RT began life as a help desk application, and much of the terminology reflects this fact. Over time, as RT developed unique features, it accumulated new terms. This appendix gives detailed explanations of a few common terms and their relationships to each other.

RT addons such as RTFM (RT FAQ Manager) and RTIR (RT for Incident Response) have their own lingo, which is not covered here. These products include their own documentation.

Ticket

The ticket is RT’s primary object, and everything that is managed by RT is contained in a ticket. A ticket represents a request, bug report, incident, work order, project, lunch order, or whatever you’re tracking with RT. As a user, most of your activity is ultimately about manipulating tickets. A ticket is identified by number and has a set of attributes, such as the subject or summary, who opened it, when it was opened, the priority of the request, and the current status. Some of these values will change over the lifespan of the ticket, such as the status, while some, such as the date the ticket was originally created, can’t be altered.

Subject

The subject of a ticket is analogous to the subject of an email: a short summary of what the ticket is about, at most a few hundred characters, intended to convey the gist of the ticket at a casual glance. Since all search result displays include the subject, it is very important that ...