## TL;DR
The triage rules evaluated in the wrong order and a generic rule won over the outage signals. Put severity and outage keywords first, latch P1s so they cannot be downgraded by later rules, and require human confirm on severity changes.

## The query
```text
ticket-triage agent misrouted a p1 outage to tier 1: rule fix
```

## Use this when
- a P1 outage was routed to tier 1
- urgent keywords are ignored by triage
- severity changes after initial routing

## Not for
- agents misrouting normal tickets
- human triage errors
- queue capacity problems

## Steps
1. Pull the misrouted ticket and trace which rule fired and in what order. Expected output: the winning rule and its position are identified.
2. Move severity and outage-keyword rules to the top of the rule chain. Expected output: P1 signals evaluate before generic category rules.
3. Add an escalation latch: once P1, later rules cannot downgrade it without human approval. Expected output: severity only moves down with a human decision.
4. Add a confidence threshold; low-confidence classifications route to a human triage queue. Expected output: ambiguous tickets get human eyes.
5. Replay recent tickets through the new rules to check for regressions. Expected output: the P1 routes correctly and nothing else shifts.

## Applies to
ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, or any ITSM with rule-based triage, AI triage agents.

## Variant phrasings
### Outage detected from monitoring, not the ticket text
Feed the monitoring severity into triage as a first-class signal.

### P1s routed right but tier 1 still gets them
Assignment rules after triage need the same severity-first ordering.

## Why it happens
Rule engines apply the first matching rule. When generic category rules sit above severity rules, every outage looks like a routine ticket until someone notices.

## Edge cases
- Keyword lists need maintenance; new outage vocabulary appears constantly.
- Test rule changes against a labeled set of historical tickets before deploying.
- Alert on latch overrides so humans review every downgrade.

## Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_uG4CFoopkAphRwI4VxKKQw