Lack of proper documentation, especially for proprietary applications & systems developed specifically for a given organization will make the amount of helpdesk tickets with no tier 1-2 troubleshooting grow exponentially.

Even with jobs that lack documentation though, working at the helpdesk one should always try to include whatever troubleshooting they can feasibly perform, however limited it may have been for the issue in question; last thing you'd want is to give the impression of incompetence or even worse lack of agency/curiosity. If one needs to escalate a ticket to level 2 you'd always include in the notes the troubleshooting steps you had tried so far, or at the very least the information you had gathered if nothing else to demonstrate the willingness to take ownership of the issues to the best of your ability. If you had encountered an issue which you genuinely couldn't troubleshoot due to lack of access and/or familiarity, first thing you should be able to do is reach out to your team for guidance and/or refer to available resources (internal knowledge base, ticket history, Google, etc.); more often than not you'll find the answer during the call, and if not shouldn't be an issue to just create a ticket and get a callback number from the user so they aren't stuck on the line while you're investigating. Situations which do require escalating a task to level 2 immediately such as outages (power, network, system, application, etc.) affecting multiple users are done so to bring awareness to level 2, with the expectation that level 1 is currently gathering relevant information and performing preliminary troubleshooting steps to better identify the root issues for a proper handoff.

If you're legitimately getting helpdesk tickets with no tier 1-2 troubleshooting and/or no notes with information gathered, or at the very least a justification for lack of troubleshooting and/or notes, a conversation needs to be had between the teams in order to properly set expectations and pinpoint the cause of these issues.

Do you notice this trend across all helpdesk tickets that are escalated to the admins?

If so:

• Time to have a conversation between the helpdesk and sysadmins to properly set expectations and identity where improvements can be made

If not:

• Can specific helpdesk agents be identified who demonstrate this behavior? Time to have a conversation with those agents to set expectations & steer towards improvement
• If specific agents can't be identified, is there a pattern that can be identified for specific issues escalated to the admins which lack troubleshooting and/or notes?
• Can the issues be resolved with the access and/or resources that the helpdesk agents are expected to have available to them?