Measuring the Efficiency of Network Operators through Trouble Ticket Correlation

Saeed Salah; Gabriel Maciá-Fernández; Jesús Esteban Díaz Verdejo; Leovigildo Sánchez Casado

Abstract:

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM), network management teams typically use Incident Ticket System (ITS) as a tool to track, troubleshoot and coordinate the resolution of network incidents that occur during the daily operation of the network. A well organized ITS may positively impact on the efficiency of incident management process. Nevertheless, in many cases the handling of tickets by the management team is not completely systematic and may be incoherent and inefficient. This way, informative or redundant tickets for the same incident may be issued, thus creating a redundancy in the system that leads to inefficiencies. In this paper, we suggest a model aimed at correlating redundant tickets in order to reduce the information to a single ticke t per incident. Using this model, we have also developed and implemented a methodology that assesses the efficiency of the management team during the process of tickets creation and management. We show the usefulness of the proposed correlation model and the methodology by evaluating it with a dataset taken from a real ticketing system of a telecommunications network company.

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