Why my trigger did not fire

The ticket events tell you exactly which rules ran. Add /events to the ticket URL and search the page for the word trigger.

The ticket events tell you exactly which rules ran, and reading them first saves most of the guessing. Add /events to the ticket's URL and search the page for the word trigger.

Symptoms

• A trigger you built does nothing on tickets that look like they match.
• It worked and then stopped.
• It fires on some tickets and not others.

Read the events before anything else

If your trigger's name is not in that list, it did not match, and the cause is in its conditions. If the name is there and the field is wrong anyway, it fired and something else overwrote the result.

Those two look identical from the ticket and have completely different causes, so this step is not optional.

Resolution steps

1. Is it inactive?

Two seconds to check, and worth doing first for exactly that reason.

2. Are the conditions possible at once?

Conditions in the Meet ALL block have to be true simultaneously. Two statuses there can never match, because a ticket has one status at a time. The same goes for two values of any single field.

3. Does the organisation or channel match?

A condition naming a particular organisation or channel silently excludes every ticket that arrived another way. This is the one that makes a trigger work in testing and not in life, because your test ticket came in through a different door.

4. Is it "is" where you needed "changed to"?

Or the reverse. A condition using changed to fires only on the update where the value became true, so testing on a ticket already in that state shows nothing at all.

5. Did something overwrite it?

Ticket triggers have looping behaviour: actions from one affect how others run and fire. So a value your trigger set can be set again by another rule in the same update, and the events show both.

6. Is the ticket closed?

A closed ticket cannot be updated, so nothing runs on it. A reply to one creates a follow-up ticket instead, and your trigger will be evaluated against that new ticket rather than the old one.

See also

• Building conditions: all, any, and the trap in between
• The order of triggers and why it matters
• Where my old tickets went: about ticket archiving