Trouble Ticket Systems?

Zen Master Nate asks: "I work for a startup ISP, and part of my job is support. A trouble ticket system would be quite helpful, but all the ones I have found are overpriced and way too complex for our needs. My question is: What trouble ticketing systems do you use, commercial, freeware/open source, or in-house? Also, if I were to write one, what features are needed, which ones are useful, and which are unnecessary? "

First Ticket :)

[AliasTheRoot]

If you head over to www.php.net [php.net], you'll find a number of freeware projects that do stuff like inventory management, trouble ticketing and web based interfaces to mail, etc - you may find something of relevence there.

wreq

[Anonymous Coward]

Wreq is a freeware web-based trouble-ticket tracking system. The url for it is http://www.math.duke.edu/~yu/wreq/ .

Keystone

[davetza]

We used keystone for a long time and never had any problems with it. It uses php and sql and has a web interface. You can find it at http://www.stonekeep.com/keystone.php3

In fact as far as I'm concerned it works far better than the very very expensive commercial solution we are now being forced to use.

Req might be useful

[noahm]

Here at the College of Computer Science [neu.edu] at Northeastern people have developed a package called Req. It is used by our systems department for tracking requests/problem reports from users. I am only familiar with it from an indirect user's point of view, meaning I've never actually seen the tracking interface in action. With a little bit of digging in the FTP site, though, I've found reference to at least web, Tk, and emacs front ends.

The FTP site is ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/sysadmin/ [neu.edu]. It doesn't seem like CCS is developing it very actively, but on the plus side it is open source.

noah

Re:Req might be useful

[mlogan]

Req is no longer used at ccs. We now use rt. req had to be abandoned because it ran only on SunOS, which was not y2k compliant.

-Mark

Re:Req might be useful

[sho-gun]

Uh.

We've run req here where I work for years in Digital Unix. req is _not_ a SunOS-specific program from what I can tell.

While req is really good for what it does, it lacks a good useable web front end (at least from the versions I've used over the years.. I could be wrong on a newer version being better).

If you have users comfortable in a unix shell, req might be the way to go. If you are looking for a nice pointy-clickety front end, you will most likely find something far better that utilizes php and an sql-esque backend.

Re:Req might be useful

[noahm]

Req is no longer used at ccs. We now use rt. req had to be abandoned because it ran only on SunOS, which was not y2k compliant.

What makes you think that Req only works on SunOS? Even the README [neu.edu] file mentions that it ran on Ultrix and was reported to have run on numerous other platforms.

noah

OpenTicket

[draziw]

Here's another OpenTicket [point-one.net]. This one lets you try it over the net.

GNATS -- ugly, yet simple and does the trick

[Paranoid Diatribe]

Give GNATS [cygnus.com] a try. It seems to be actively maintained, it has various front ends (tk, web, email, command line), it's pretty lean, and it does the trick.

It isn't very pretty, though. I don't know how the setup is, but we use it where I work (large public university), and it works. Our version is a little dated, so there may be some improvements.

I hear that Bugzilla [mozilla.org] is nice, though I haven't tried it myself.

MOT and Track-IT

[Mike_L]

My company will soon be providing technical support for corporate PC users. We are considering using the commercial Track-IT software package to manage trouble tickets and PC inventory. I am wary of the package because it runs only on Windows and is not customiseable.

I have looked at the MOT [sourceforge.net] package and it seems to have a lot of potential. Unfortunately the included job tracking database is incomplete. Specifically it is lacking report features. I would love to use MOT and develop the job tracking database. Unfortunately our management is leaning toward the rigid uncustomiseable Track-IT system.

MOT stands for Ministry Of Truth - a clever project name I must add.
Has anyone deployed MOT in a production environment?

Mike_L

Re:wreq

[Hackboy]

I used wreq at my last job. It was used as a site trouble ticket system and we were planning on replacing it with something more powerful, but I left the company before management decided on a new system. Wreq served the company well for a couple of years

Strong points:

• Open source, change it to suit your liking.
• Easy to integrate into other systems
• Simple email interface.
• Fast

Weak points:

• Limited "ownership" of tickets
• No escalation
• Web interface a little confusing.
• Searching capabilites limited

My < .02 :)

[Roogna]

Well, here at work (company in this case shall remain unnamed, sadly, I'd love to bitch about them;) they use Remedy.
A big expensive commercial trouble ticket package which should never have become a shipping product.
Though supposedly they have the second largest base of users for a software product in the world.
Us, being the Sun admins taking care of the servers for Remedy, have actually had to implement our own trouble ticket/change control system for Remedy. So we've gone with a web based solution for that, which handles our feature set pretty well.
Basically we gather contact info, group info, project info, priority, what the problem is, who found it, etc...
I'm in the process of putting a snazzy interface on it, and actually am also working on a real version at home in my spare time. Figure Remedy gets emense ammounts of money every day for their product, I could do a commercial release of mine for a pitance, and maybe earn a little spare change to actually live off of.

Bugzilla?

[yomoma]

Couldn't Bugzilla [mozilla.org] be used for this?

reviews

[CR0]

i believe this is the page you are looking for. http://www.iac.honeywell.com/Pub/Tech/CM/PMTools.h tml#FreeTools [honeywell.com].
There are reviews of many commercial and free apps.

at work we use css, cpma, infoman, and soon remedy and esm. most of these are rare and/or custom built. the one feature i like, however, is an audit trail for updates, with timestamp. a must have.

RT trouble ticketing system

[WebTurtle]

You may want to look at RT (Request Tracker) [fsck.com]. It is an open-source GPLed trouble-ticketing system created by Jesse Vincent. They are about to release version 2. It has SQL backend, and is quite sophisticated.

http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/

RT the Request Tracker

[gando]

I started using req, as many here have suggested, but it had too many features we did not need in my department. Later we found RT or Request Tracker. It uses a SQL backend, and has a nice web interface, sends out your standard "your request was received" messages, and does a good job with tracking. I have been using it long enough that I'm not sure what it's weaknesses are, but I would like to see a "FAQ 'em" set of buttons added (and the developer has mentioned it might get it)

Here is the developers site, it is GPL, BTW:

http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/