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Serval supports different ticket types to help you categorize and handle various kinds of support needs appropriately.

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Understanding Ticket Types

Request

A request for something new—access, equipment, information, or a service

Incident

Something is broken or not working as expected and needs to be fixed

Major Incident

A high-impact incident, such as a widespread outage, that needs an urgent, coordinated response

Change

A controlled modification to your environment that follows a governed lifecycle

Problem

A root-cause investigation behind one or more incidents, tracked to a resolution

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Requests

Requests represent asks for something the employee doesn’t currently have:
  • Access requests - “I need access to Salesforce”
  • Equipment requests - “Can I get a second monitor?”
  • Service requests - “Please set up a new Slack channel for our team”
  • Information requests - “What’s the policy on remote work?”
Requests typically follow a fulfillment workflow: receive → approve (if needed) → provision → complete.

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Incidents

Incidents represent issues that need to be fixed:
  • System issues - “Email is not syncing on my phone”
  • Bugs - “The dashboard is showing incorrect data”
  • Outages - “I can’t access the VPN”
  • Errors - “I’m getting an error message when I try to submit”
Incidents typically follow a resolution workflow: receive → diagnose → fix → verify → complete.

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Major Incidents

Major incidents represent high-impact issues that affect many people at once:
  • Widespread outages - “The VPN is down for the whole company”
  • Provider failures - “No one can log in through Okta”
  • Core app unavailable - “Email is down for everyone”
  • Critical degradation - “The network is unusable across the office”
As new reports come in, Serval links each related ticket on the same team to the existing major incident, rather than linking those tickets to one another, so everyone affected is tracked and updated together. Only team managers can create a major incident. For the full model, including AI-driven and manual linking and broadcasts, see Incident Management.

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Changes

Changes represent controlled modifications to your environment:
  • Infrastructure changes - “Deploy the new database cluster to production”
  • Configuration changes - “Update the firewall rules for the new office network”
  • Hardware changes - “Replace the UPS batteries in server room B”
  • Software changes - “Upgrade the CRM to version 4.2”
Changes follow a governed lifecycle with assessment, authorization, implementation, and review stages. Each change is associated with a change model (Normal, Standard, or Emergency) that determines the required approvals and process gates. For full details, see Change Management.

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Problems

Problems represent the investigation into the underlying cause behind one or more incidents:
  • Recurring incidents - “The VPN keeps dropping every afternoon—find out why”
  • Root-cause analysis - “Determine what caused last week’s outage and how to prevent it”
  • Known-error tracking - “Document the workaround while we work on a permanent fix”
Use a Problem when incidents are being restored but the underlying cause still needs to be found, summarized, and tracked. An owner is assigned the problem and decides what to do with it—whether to trigger a Change to implement the permanent fix or raise a Request for a related service need. For full details, see Problem Management.
Incidents are about restoring service quickly; problems are about making sure the same issue doesn’t come back. A single problem often sits behind several related incidents.

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Custom Types

When none of the built-in types fit, your team can define its own custom ticket type — for example, Legal Intake, Onboarding, or Access Review. Each custom type has its own lifecycle, transitions, entry workflows, and custom fields. For full details, see Custom Ticket Types.

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How Ticket Types Affect Handling

These types connect to each other — an incident can log a problem, a problem can drive a change, and so on. To create one ticket type from another with AI-assisted prefill, see Ticket Flows.

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AI Classification

Serval’s AI automatically classifies incoming tickets as requests or incidents based on the message content. The AI looks for signals like:
  • Request signals - “I need”, “Can I get”, “Please set up”, “Requesting”
  • Incident signals - “Not working”, “Error”, “Broken”, “Can’t access”, “Issue with”

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Configuring Ticket Types

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Enable/Disable Types

In team settings, you can configure which ticket types are available:
  1. Go to Team Settings → Ticket Types
  2. Toggle types on or off based on your team’s needs
  3. Some teams may only handle requests (e.g., HR) while others handle both

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Type-Specific Settings

Configure different behaviors for each ticket type:
Create type-specific statuses:
  • Requests: “Pending Approval”, “Provisioning”, “Fulfilled”
  • Incidents: “Investigating”, “Identified”, “Monitoring”, “Resolved”
Set different response and resolution times:
  • High-priority incidents may have 1-hour SLA
  • High-priority requests may have 24-hour SLA
Route types to different assignees:
  • Requests → General IT team
  • Incidents → Senior IT operations team

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Best Practices

Keep it simple

For most teams, just Request and Incident are sufficient. Add more types only if you have distinct handling needs.

Match your ITSM

If you sync with an external system, align your ticket types with their categories.