Ticket Statuses, Priorities, and Severity Explained

Why these three fields matter

Every StretchSupport ticket carries three separate signals that people often confuse: status (where it is in your workflow), priority (how urgently you'll respond), and severity (how much impact it has). Keeping them distinct is what makes your board, your SLA radar, and your reporting trustworthy. This article is the canonical reference for all three.

Status: the lifecycle

Status tracks the stage of the ticket. StretchSupport uses eight statuses, in this order:

1. New — the ticket has arrived but nobody has picked it up. This is the default for any ticket you create.
2. Triage — an agent is reading it, categorizing it, and deciding priority and queue.
3. Open — actively being worked by an owner.
4. Waiting on Customer — you've responded and are waiting for the customer to reply or provide something.
5. Waiting Internal — you're blocked on another team (engineering, billing, operations).
6. Resolved — you believe it's fixed and are waiting for confirmation.
7. Closed — confirmed done. No further action expected.
8. Archived — a soft-delete. The ticket is removed from the board, queues, and SLA radar but its record and history are preserved.

How status affects the SLA timer

The SLA clock runs only while a ticket is active. As soon as a ticket becomes Resolved, Closed, or Archived, its timer stops and the radar reports it as Met. The open count on your dashboard includes New, Triage, Open, Waiting on Customer, and Waiting Internal; the waiting count is just the two waiting states.

Priority: how urgently you respond

Priority has four levels, and each maps directly to a service-level target window:

Priority also drives sort order on the board: Urgent tickets appear first, then High, then Normal, then Low. Normal is the default for a new ticket. When you route a ticket into a queue, the queue's default priority can set or raise the priority automatically — for example, the Account & Access queue defaults to High.

Severity: how much impact it has

Severity is separate from priority and describes the blast radius of the problem:

• Standard — routine request affecting one user or a non-critical function. The default.
• Elevated — meaningful impact: an important workflow is degraded, or several users are affected.
• Critical — a major outage or data/security-level problem affecting many users.

Severity does not change the SLA timer — that's what priority is for — but it's the field you filter and report on when you want to understand impact, and it's the signal you use to justify escalation. A ticket can be Critical severity and, once mitigated, drop to Normal priority while you finish the cleanup.

Putting them together: a realistic example

A customer reports that invoices are showing the wrong tax total for every account. You create the ticket as:

• Status: Triage while you confirm the scope.
• Severity: Critical — it affects all accounts and touches money.
• Priority: Urgent — you need to respond within 4 hours.

Once you've shipped a fix and confirmed it, you move Status → Resolved (stopping the SLA clock) and leave Severity: Critical so the incident is easy to find in reporting later. When the customer confirms, you move to Closed.

Tips

• Don't inflate priority to "make it show up." Priority sets the SLA target; over-using Urgent makes the radar noisy and hides genuinely urgent work.
• Use severity for post-incident reporting — it survives even after the ticket is resolved and the SLA clock stops.
• Move tickets to Waiting on Customer promptly. It's honest about who owns the next step and keeps your active load realistic.
• Reserve Archived for true removal. It hides the ticket everywhere; use Closed for the normal end of a ticket's life.

FAQ

What's the difference between Resolved and Closed? Resolved means you think it's fixed but are waiting for the customer to confirm. Closed means it's confirmed and finished. Both stop the SLA timer.

Can I delete a ticket permanently? The delete action sets status to Archived (a soft-delete) rather than removing the row, so your audit history stays intact.

Does severity change the SLA target? No. Only priority sets the target window (Urgent 4h / High 8h / Normal 24h / Low 72h). Severity is an impact label.