Two questions come up in every team-lead check-in: who is holding Open tickets right now, and which ticket has been sitting in Open the longest. Qvasa answers both with a pair of by-agent metrics built on assignment sessions: Active Open Assignments counts them, and Longest Time in Open Status times them — from the moment the ticket last entered the Open status to right now. Both are live, both drill into the actual tickets, and neither cares which channel the ticket came in on.

This guide covers what the two metrics count, where to find them, how to read the numbers, and how to open the tickets behind them.

Both metrics measure exactly the same population — an open assignment on a ticket that is in the Open status. Both conditions have to hold at once, so a count and a duration sitting next to each other always describe the same work. An assignment is included when all three of these are true:

Any channel counts. Email, Messaging, chat, Talk — there is no channel condition on either metric. An agent holding one email ticket and one Talk ticket has two active open assignments. (If you want a single channel, the per-channel live columns described in Open-status metrics on ticket assignment sessions do that job.)

Assignments are counted, not tickets. If the same agent is assigned to the same ticket twice, that is two assignments and the count says 2. This is what makes the number a measure of how much an agent is currently holding rather than how many distinct tickets exist.

Both are live snapshots. They describe this moment. Selecting a past end date does not reconstruct who was holding what back then — for that, use the historical assignment-session metrics.

Side by side, the pair tells you two different things about the same team. The count finds the agent carrying the most; the duration finds the ticket that has been sitting in Open the longest. They rarely point at the same person, which is the point:

[SCREENSHOT: pair_overview]

Here Karen is holding the most open assignments (3), but Mark is the one to talk to: his ticket has been sitting in Open for over nine hours.

The Agents table is the natural home for this pair: one row per agent, both numbers side by side, every column sortable. Add an Agents table widget to a dashboard, then open its Configure Columns icon in the widget's top bar.

In the column list, type open into the search box. Both columns are in the results — add them together:

[SCREENSHOT: configure_columns]

Two neighbours in that same result list measure something else, so add them deliberately rather than by accident: Longest Open Assignment runs the other clock (covered below), and the Avg / Median open status duration columns are historical averages over finished assignment sessions, not live snapshots.

Sort by Longest Time in Open Status descending and the agent who needs attention is the top row. An agent holding nothing open reads 0, and their duration cell stays blank — there is no open ticket to time.

Here is the table above, with the two underlying timestamps written out so you can check every number by hand. "Now" is the moment the dashboard loaded.

[SCREENSHOT: agents_table]

Active Open Assignments is a straight count. One row per assignment the agent is still holding whose ticket is in Open at this moment. Karen is holding three, so her cell reads 3. It counts assignments rather than tickets, so an agent assigned to the same ticket twice contributes 2.

Longest Time in Open Status is a maximum, not a sum and not an average:

So Karen's three tickets entered Open 6h 12m, 1h 36m and 41m ago. Her cell reads 6h 12m — the oldest one. It is not 8h 29m (the three added together) and not 2h 50m (their average). Only the worst ticket is shown, because that is the one that needs attention.

The clock restarts every time the ticket re-enters Open. A ticket that went Open at 9am, moved to Pending at 11am, and came back to Open at 2pm reads from 2pm — not from 9am, and not 2 hours plus however long it has been back. If you want time accumulated across every Open stretch, that is a different, historical metric.

Cameron's row is the one worth studying. He was assigned 2h 01m ago, but his ticket only moved into Open 26m ago — it sat in another status while he worked it. His cell reads 26m, because the column times the ticket's stay in Open, not his hold on it. Had you used Longest Open Assignment instead, that row would read 2h 01m.

Every number on both metrics is inspectable. On a donut chart, click the magnifying glass in the widget's top bar and choose Inspect Tickets Pop Up; on an Agents table, click the cell itself. Either way you get the real tickets, with a View in Qvasa link on each row and a CSV export:

The two metrics deliberately inspect to different things. Active Open Assignments hands you the full list of tickets being held. Longest Time in Open Status hands you one ticket per agent — the specific one its clock was measured on — so you land straight on the ticket that has been sitting in Open the longest.

Clicking a donut slice does something different again: it drills the whole dashboard down to that agent. Use the magnifying glass when you want the tickets, the slice when you want to see everything else about that agent.

There is a second duration metric over this exact same population, and picking the wrong one is the most common mistake with these numbers. Longest Open Assignment (widget picker: Longest open status assignment session duration by agent) counts from when the agent was assigned. Longest Time in Open Status counts from when the ticket entered Open.

They answer different questions:

Either clock can be the longer one. A ticket that was already Open when the agent picked it up gives the bigger number to Longest Time in Open Status; a ticket the agent was assigned while it was Pending, and which only moved to Open later, gives the bigger number to Longest Open Assignment. Because each metric takes its own maximum, the two can report different numbers and drill into different tickets for the same agent. That is expected. If you want the customer-facing answer, use Longest Time in Open Status; if you are managing agent workload, add Longest Open Assignment alongside it.

Both metrics also work as standalone donut charts if you want them as their own widgets rather than table columns. Edit a dashboard, click Add Widget, choose Donut chart, and look under Granular Assignment Session Metrics; typing open status into the search box brings both into view.

In the picker the two go by their full names: Active open status ticket assignment sessions by agent and Longest time in open status by agent.

The date range decides which assignments are eligible, by when the agent picked the ticket up. This matters more than it first looks: an assignment that started before your range began is not counted, even though the agent is still holding it and the ticket is still Open.

Note that the range filters the assignments, not the clock. Once an assignment qualifies, Longest Time in Open Status measures back to when the ticket entered Open even if that moment falls outside the selected range, so a duration can legitimately be longer than the range itself.

So pick a range that reaches back far enough to cover how long tickets realistically stay with an agent. A Today range answers "what has the team picked up today and still has open". A wider range catches the assignments that have been sitting since last week — usually the ones you most want to find.