Ticket number generation mechanism in Service Desk Manager

Products

• CA Service Management - Service Desk Manager
• CA Service Desk Manager

Issue/Introduction

Whenever a CA SDM ticket is created, there is a ticket number generated.  How does this work and how large can ticket numbers be?

Is there a reason why ticket numbers get skipped as well?

Environment

Service Desk Manager
All Supported Operating Systems and versions

Resolution

Prefixes and ref_num:

In CA SDM, one can navigate to the Administration tab -> Service Desk -> Sequence Numbers. This functionality is where one can add a specific prefix or suffix to Change Orders, Issues, or Requests/Incidents/Problems. When any of the given CA SDM tickets are created, the assigned ticket number in sequence from Key_Control then has the prefix and suffix added.

Example: prefix can be "req-" for request, and suffix can be "-2015" for the given year. Adding to a ticket number generated from the Key_Control (i.e., 1234), the resultant CA SDM ticket number (i.e., "req-1234-2015") is stored in the given Issue, Change Order, or Request table under the corresponding ref_num field.

The ref_num or chg_ref_num fields per table are nvarchar(30), indicating a string length of maximum 30 characters.

Once a ref_num has been allocated for a given ticket during creation or by the act of recycling SDM Services, if the ticket is canceled, the allocated ref_num is lost, and its expenditure is not logged at all within SDM.

Sequence Numbers:

A CA SDM ticket number is generated via the Key_Control MDB table.

What happens is the table stores the most recent number to be assigned in sequence for the next CA SDM ticket to be generated. When a ticket is to be created, it will be given that number from Key_Control in sequence and the value in the table is incremented. The given numeric limitation in Key_Control, as an integer value, is defined in SQL Server as 2^31-1 or 2,147,483,647.

Skipping a Sequence Number:

In order to minimize SQL requests against the key_control table, the system will reserve six ticket numbers in memory and increment the next ticket number by six in the key_control table. If all six are used in the session, the system will then allocate six more and increment the next ticket number in the table by a further six.

Service Desk Manager ticket reference numbers may be skipped from one of the following activities:

• Service Desk is recycled
  
  
• Ticket creation is canceled.

If you start the system and open a new Call Request, Cancel it, and then shut down the Service Desk Manager service, the next ticket opened will be six more than the previous one.

CA Service Desk Manager was designed this way to minimize locking and I/O on the key_control table in the database. This improves overall performance.

Additional Information

The Service Point UI does not discard a ticket number if one elects to cancel ticket creation using this approach.

Setting base/starting ticket number and prefix code used by CA Service Desk Manager (CA SDM)