Ticket Tracking and Customer Management?

An anonymous reader writes "Like many Slashdot readers, I'm sure, I run a small side business doing IT consulting in addition to my day job. I'm looking for a good open-source ticket tracking system that I can run under Linux, preferably one that also has some customer management features. I'd like to be able to maintain a separate record for each job, along with time tracking, work logs, and information about the customer. Much of what I see on Sourceforge is, as usual, pre-pre-pre-alpha with no actual code. Does anyone have any suggestions for a project that might fit my needs?"

Eventum

[Lordrashmi]

A bit of shameless self promotion (since I am the lead developer), check out Eventum [mysql.org].

It might not be the perfect fit for you, but it is stable and customizable. Right now it is lacking built in customer management features, instead it relies on a Customer API to integrate with other systems. Right now I am working on integration with Sugar CRM but do not yet have an ETA on when it will be released.

Re:RT For sure

[yarbel]

RT does not scale well at all however. We have had to make major modifications to the source in order to support 200,000+ tickets.

Re:RT

[zeath]

When researching a ticket tracking system to implement at my workplace I came with no experience in any non-proprietary system. I compared RT and trac [edgewall.org] side-by-side and found trac to be much more readable and user-friendly. Even for me, when setting it up, I spent an entire day trying to make heads or tails of the RT interface, while in a day I already had trac up and running and I was showing others how to log in and use it. Now that it is in production, what surprises me the most is the ease with which the non-IT department managers use it for tracking their tickets and project progress.

The irony of the situation is that I do specialize in Perl, which is why I went toward RT first. I assumed it would have been the better choice for making any changes to the underlying system, but in the process of working with trac I've learned Python enough to hack together a number of custom solutions for our needs.

Since I didn't go any further with RT after that first day, I can't say how well that would have worked, but in my case RT did leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Did you index it?

[g8orade]

hmmm.
We've been running it for 2 plus years now, have 100,000 plus tickets, and it's quite fast. We did have to add an index recently when coming back to All Tickets view and many of us have a lot of queues.

I see others have had issues / bad experiences. Our shop has some very experienced Oracle guys and someone who, so far, has been able to make it do everything we've wanted it to using Perl mods. (auto assignment based on subject contents, custom fields, etc.).
Maybe other tools are easier when you don't have this kind of support.

We are using it also for project management and in conjunction with Twiki; it's quite effective to create an RT ticket and link it to a wiki page, instead of uploading attachments. This way we end up creating a web FAQ / history and have RT all at once.

Trac (Open Source; Python)

[joost]

Trac [edgewall.org] is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies.

It provides an interface to Subversion, an integrated Wiki and convenient reporting facilities.

OSTicket

[appleguru]

http://www.osticket.com/ [osticket.com]

It works well; I use it integrated with Help Center Live [helpcenterlive.com]

PHP Support Tickets

[DigitalReverend]

This isn't a bad package it works under linux and allows you to have different levels of users. Your customers are able to look up their tickets to watch the progress of resolution. (If you allow it)

http://www.phpsupporttickets.com/ [phpsupporttickets.com]