# What is Ticket Triage?

> Sorting incoming tickets by type, urgency, and owner before work begins.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/ticket-triage · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

Triage is the first pass on a ticket: understanding what it is, setting priority and severity, tagging it, and deciding who should handle it.

## Why it matters

Fast, accurate triage keeps urgent issues from waiting behind routine ones and sends technical tickets to people who can solve them.

## Best practices

1. Triage within minutes. Even if the work takes longer.
2. Use a consistent tag set. So reporting is reliable.
3. Spot clusters. Several similar tickets at once usually means an incident.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal triages each ticket with an investigation attached, so priority and ownership are based on evidence.

## Related terms

- [Ticket Routing](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/ticket-routing): Automatically sending each ticket to the right queue, team, or person.
- [Priority](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/priority): How soon a ticket should be worked, relative to everything else.
- [Severity Level](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/severity-level): A rating of how much harm an issue is causing, from outage to cosmetic.
- [Backlog](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/backlog): Open tickets waiting on someone, and the clearest early sign a team is underwater.

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