Ability to associate maintenance tickets with acknowledged alarms

[jacquelinegarrahan]

At SLAC, we require the ability to associate maintenance tickets with acknowledged alarms. Further we require the ability to create an association between an alarm group and ticket numbers associated with composing PVs. This could be accomplished by adding additional “tickets” field in the alarm state representation for tracking ticket identifiers and optionally sending ticket numbers alongside the acknowledge command. Ticket removal would require the implementation of a new command.

The upwards inheritance of this model would have to be carefully considered. For instance, consider the case where a single ticket association is created for two group members. Removal of the ticket for one of the members must not remove the ticket from the group unless the other has also been removed.

I’m not familiar with maintenance ticket systems at other facilities. SLAC’s CATER system is simple in that ticket identifiers are numbered.

Is this format for maintenance ticketing generalizable to other sites?