Ticket Aging
How long currently-open tickets have been sitting unresolved, usually read as a distribution across age bands rather than a single average.
Ticket age = now − ticket opened (or last status change); reported as the distribution of open tickets across age bands.Ticket aging tracks how long open tickets have been waiting, measured from when each was created (or last touched) to right now. It is almost always read as a distribution — a count of open tickets in bands like 0-2 days, 3-10 days, 10-30 days, and 30-plus — rather than a single number, because the shape of the tail is the whole point.
The metric exists to catch what resolution time cannot. Average resolution time is calculated only on tickets that have already closed, so the ones that never close — the stuck, the reassigned, the quietly abandoned — are structurally invisible to it. Aging is the view of the live backlog, and it is where the oldest and most damaging cases surface. HDI's service-desk benchmarking segments the backlog into fresh (under 10 days), simmering (10-30 days), and unacceptable (30-plus), and sets the target for that last band at zero.
What it hides: the number is easy to launder. Auto-closing tickets on customer non-response, merging duplicates, or splitting one long thread into new tickets all reset the clock without resolving anything. A comfortable-looking average age can also mask a bimodal backlog — a flood of same-day tickets pulling the mean down over a fat tail of ancient ones — which is exactly why you read the bands and not the average.