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Kaedon • today at 6:44 AM • 7 replies • view on HN

At ~$21,700 saved per million tickets, saving millions annually would suggest at least 92 million tickets a year to reach $2 million saved. Is that about right?

I initially thought of tickets as just customer support, or internal JIRAs, but the article mentions alarms, security findings, and capacity increase requests, so that makes the scale feel more plausible. Still surprising so many tickets go through the system.


Replies

dansalvato • today at 2:23 PM

In my past experience in IT, the ticketing system basically doubled as an aggregated event log, and it was a legitimately good use case. The monitoring software we ran on our thousands of client workstations and servers was extremely powerful and could capture any conceivable metric to use as a trigger for auto-generating a ticket.

So, a lot of tickets generated would simply just be data reports with some info dumped in the ticket description, designed to be auto-closed but possibly useful later as an easily-accessible timestamped reference to some data.

Lots of other auto-generated tickets were "probably not an issue but it should pass over the eyes of someone knowledgable about this server/network" tickets. Like Windows Event Log error roundups, CPU usage spikes, or specific triggers that were set up in the aftermath of some catastrophe to help preemptively avoid a repeat incident.

Anyway, tickets are a great "first line of filtration" where you can take a massive ingest of all different kinds of data (hardware metrics, system logs, network activity), apply meaningful human context ("This pattern could be a sign of xyz"), and store it in a unified database. With that use case, it's easy to imagine a company with millions of customers and millions of servers producing millions of tickets.

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a012 • today at 11:46 AM

When you’re enterprise size, every request needs a ticket otherwise it didn’t happen

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iLoveOncall • today at 9:37 AM

Yes, easily. I work for a "small" org in Amazon and it has more than 100,000 tickets a month. And it's a small fish in terms of number of tickets. As another commenter pointed out, tickets are used for basically everything administrative.

I checked just for fun and there are actually a LOT LOT more than 92M tickets in the past year.

f0cus10 • today at 6:58 AM

yes, there's a ticket for EVERYTHING. people have tickets cut in their names even decades after they've left

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sjdh76 • today at 7:35 AM

Well there is the UFO/Bigfoot/Poltergeist crowd.

If you dont fully pay attention to their theories about what they think is the reason for the suspicious stain on the ground in the parking lot, the queue is going to get flooded. If your Boss belongs to that club oh man god say the division.

catchnear4321 • today at 11:23 AM

it is a corporate mantra many of us want to forget. it also functions as a response to any request.

“submit a ticket!”

vasco • today at 6:58 AM

Well if they use VPN point to point connections managed by AWS they'll get an email per week until they die for each VPN instance from AWS that they need to put in trash so I understand them.