7 Steps to Reduce TicketOps within Platform Engineering

Almost every developer knows the pain of waiting days or even weeks for a single ticket to be resolved.

If you haven't experienced it, here's what it looks like: you need a new environment or database for a project, so you submit a request to your platform team. Sometimes, it takes a few hours; at other times, it takes days. In both cases, there's a waiting period and often a lot of back-and-forth communication. Worse still, sometimes when you finally get a response, it's not what you expected, and the whole process starts again.

This entire cycle, with all its delays and inefficiencies, is what's called TicketOps. It's what happens when platform management depends on manual approvals instead of self-service and automation. This results in slower teams, reduced morale, and scaling that feels almost impossible to achieve.

But it doesn't have to be this way. With the proper practices and tooling, TicketOps can be drastically reduced.

In this article, we'll define what TicketOps is, explain why it's a bottleneck you can't afford to ignore, and explore seven practical steps to help you eliminate it for good.

What is TicketOps?

TicketOps is the practice of managing platforms through manual tickets. Every request, whether it involves provisioning a new environment, granting database access, or updating a service, begins with a ticket and concludes with human approval.

It's easy to see why it became so common. Early on, tickets gave teams control and visibility. They ensured that only approved requests were processed and that every change had a documented paper trail. For small teams, it worked just fine.

However, as organisations and workloads grew, this model began to break down. The queue got longer. Now, engineers have to spend more time triaging than building. To get resources to handle simple requests could take days, and for complex ones, it could end up stalling the entire project.

Why TicketOps is unsustainable

As stated earlier, the initial thought regarding TicketOps is that it's relatively manageable and a good way to maintain control. However, you'll soon notice that as your organisation grows larger, control can be lost because it becomes one of the most significant sources of delays and downtime.

The following are ways you'll start noticing TicketOps becoming unsustainable:

• Delays and bottlenecks: Every ticket must be reviewed, approved, and acted upon manually. When demand increases, requests accumulate more quickly than they can be processed. Developers are left waiting, and delivery timelines start to stretch.

• Compliance and audit risks: Manual work equals inconsistent work. Different engineers might apply policies differently or skip steps under pressure. Over time, this creates policy drift, making compliance audits more challenging to pass.

• Developer time wasted: Question: While developers wait for their tickets to be responded to or even approved, what gets done? Nothing! That's time that could be spent building new features or improving reliability.

• Scaling problems: The more teams that adopt the platform, the more ticket volume grows. However, the number of platform engineers usually doesn't. So what could start as a few simple requests soon becomes an unmanageable queue that stalls the entire development process.

How do I reduce TicketOps? Here are 7 steps

So far, we've emphasised the problems with TicketOps. Now, let's explore practical steps to reduce it.

1. Standardising service offerings

Most platform teams deal with the same types of requests repeatedly. It's usually requests for new cloud or Kubernetes environments (dev, staging, or test clusters), along with databases, CI runners, or monitoring integrations such as Grafana or Prometheus.

These are usually small asks, but when repeated hundreds of times, they become the most significant source of TicketOps fatigue. The first step to reducing this is to standardise them.

To do this, you should start by reviewing the most common tickets your team receives. Group them by request type and frequency, then identify which ones follow a consistent pattern.

Traditionally, teams have used templates to standardise these requests. Although templates help, they're static, i.e, they define how something should be created but don’t manage how it evolves or how requests are handled over time. This often brings TicketOps back in through the side door: as soon as something changes, teams have to submit new tickets to update or fix it.

In this case, the best option is to use something akin to a Kratix Promise.

A Promise in Kratix makes this process dynamic. It acts like a programmable API for platform capabilities,

handling the full lifecycle from deployment and configuration to updates and deprecation, without manual intervention. Instead of raising tickets for each new request or change, developers use Promises to get what they need through governed, self-service workflows.

By publishing Promises instead of templates, platform teams provide developers with reusable, self-service APIs that remain consistent over time. These Promises can then be surfaced through a service catalogue or portal, such as Backstage, making it easy for developers to discover and consume platform capabilities safely.

2. Automate provisioning with self-service APIs

Once your services are standardised, the next step is to make them self-service. This is where most teams typically see the greatest impact.

Instead of managing a ticket queue, give developers the ability to request what they need through APIs. These APIs serve as a contract between the platform and its users, ensuring that every request follows a validated process without requiring manual approvals.

Using the Kratix route, these APIs, as mentioned earlier, are Promise-based. Each Promise provides a reusable and secure interface for provisioning a specific capability, such as a 'Postgres-Dev' Promise or an 'S3-Bucket' Promise. When a developer makes a request, Kratix automatically provisions the resource using predefined configurations, policies, and access rules.

This doesn't just remove the ticket, but also the uncertainty because every resource is created through the same governed workflow, which means consistent security, faster delivery, and no risk of someone skipping a critical configuration step.

3. Implement policy-as-code

As your platform scales, ensuring that every deployment adheres to the same security, compliance, and configuration rules becomes critical. This is where policy-as-code comes in.

By codifying your policies, whether they cover naming conventions, security checks, or resource limits, you automate compliance rather than relying on manual processes. Tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA) and Kyverno can enforce these rules at every stage of the workflow, ensuring that only valid configurations reach production.

While policy-as-code tools handle enforcement, Kratix complements this by providing a consistent framework for applying those policies across environments. Every Promise ensures that requests go through governed workflows, so compliance isn’t left to chance; instead, it’s embedded into how the platform delivers services.

4. Integrate with developer portals

Even the most potent platform features can go unused if developers can't find them. That's why integrating with developer portals is a key step in reducing TicketOps.

Developer portals, such as Backstage, provide teams with a central location to discover and utilize platform services. Instead of raising a ticket or asking on Slack, a developer can log in, view available Promises like 'Create a Postgres Instance' or 'Provision a Dev Environment', and trigger them with a few clicks.

When you make Kratix Promises available through the portal, self-service becomes practical.. Each Promise already has policies, configurations, and access controls built in, so developers get safe, consistent outcomes without needing to know the platform's internals.

This also introduces golden paths: curated workflows that guide developers toward approved, secure, and efficient ways of doing things. Golden paths reduce decision fatigue, eliminate common mistakes, and enable teams to deliver quickly while staying compliant.

The result of this is a platform that feels intuitive, i.e, developers focus on shipping features, while the platform handles everything behind the scenes.

5. Continuously reconcile with GitOps

Automation doesn't end once a resource is created; it continues to run in the background. Over time, someone could make a manual change, a policy update could be missed, or a service could be patched in one cluster but not the other. These minor inconsistencies eventually lead to outages or security gaps.

The best way to prevent this is to adopt a GitOps-based reconciliation model. Tools like Flux and Argo CD automatically sync the actual platform state with the desired state defined in Git. If a configuration changes outside the approved workflow, it's automatically corrected to match the source of truth.

Kratix builds on this principle with state stores. Whether you're running a handful of clusters or managing a global fleet, Kratix continually reconciles each environment to maintain consistency and compliance.

With this, all updates, rollbacks, and policy changes are applied uniformly and safely across all workloads. Therefore, there's no manual checking, no hidden drift, and no surprises during audits.

6. Centralise lifecycle management

Adding to what we said earlier, as your platform grows, so does the complexity of managing the lifecycle of its components. Now, you must start thinking about versioning, updates, and deprecations; otherwise, your platform will begin to decay.

That's why centralised lifecycle management is essential. It provides platform teams with a single point of control for versioning, updating, and eventually deprecating services, eliminating the need for manual tracking of service locations. The platform defines these rules once and applies them everywhere.

With Kratix, this is built in. Since promises are declarative, updates can be rolled out automatically across the fleet. The exact mechanism that provisions a new service also manages its upgrades, ensuring consistency without manual intervention.

When services reach the end of their lifecycle, Kratix helps platform teams manage updates and phase out older versions consistently across the fleet. By defining these workflows declaratively, teams can ensure that outdated configurations don’t linger and cause operational risk, thereby reducing the likelihood of “shadow infrastructure.”

By managing the full lifecycle from a central control point, you eliminate the hidden toil that comes with growth. Your platform remains up to date, compliant, and ready to scale, regardless of the number of teams or clusters it supports.

7. Measure and improve developer experience

Reducing TicketOps is generally about making developers' lives easier and helping teams deliver faster. But you can't improve what you don't measure.

To achieve this, begin by tracking key indicators such as ticket volume, time-to-value, and developer satisfaction. If the number of requests handled through self-service APIs is increasing while the ticket count drops, that's a strong sign of progress. Similarly, shorter lead times for provisioning environments or databases show that automation is working.

However, metrics only tell part of the story; you must pair them with developer feedback to gain a comprehensive understanding. Regularly check how easy it is to discover and use platform capabilities, how much time teams save, and where friction still exists. This feedback loop is what turns your platform from a set of tools into a product that truly serves its users.

While Kratix provides the structure for consistent delivery, platform teams can extend this by instrumenting Promises and workflows with observability tools to track usage, performance, and reliability. This visibility enables teams to understand how the platform is being utilized and where improvements can be made.

The goal isn't perfection; it's continuous improvement. Each iteration makes the platform simpler, faster, and more enjoyable to use until TicketOps becomes a thing of the past.

Beyond tickets: the platform advantage

Beyond reducing delays, cutting down TicketOps is really about changing how teams work.

It's how platform teams evolve from just responding to requests to actually enabling developers. By standardising capabilities, coupled with the other steps mentioned above, they create a foundation that scales with the organisation rather than being a bottleneck.

This is the platform advantage: every request becomes faster, safer, and more consistent without adding manual work.

With Kratix, this shift happens by design. It turns platform capabilities into reusable Promises that handle provisioning, policy enforcement, and lifecycle management automatically.. Regardless of whether you're managing a few clusters or a global fleet, Kratix provides the structure and governance to deliver secure, self-service platforms at scale.

You can learn more about Kratix and how it can help your team reduce TicketOps by visiting the Syntasso website or checking out the Kratix documentation.