Ticketing System - migration to RT Iwo Olszewski, PSNC - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Ticketing System - migration to RT

Iwo Olszewski, PSNC iwo@man.poznan.pl 7th TF-NOC meeting, December 13, 2012

Agenda

• Migration background
• Request Tracker
• PSNC installation
• Migration
• Lessons learnt

Migration background

Ticketing system is used by PSNC NOC to maintain issues related with PIONIER, POZMAN and services provided by PSNC

• Previous solution: Own made Trouble Ticket System, >10 year old
• Written in Java but by many developers and with many quick fixes
• A lack of desired functionality
• A cost of further development was higher than cost of new deployment

Request Tracker

• A open source web and email-based bug tracking and trouble ticketing
• system. Written in Perl.

PSNC installation

• Apache + mod_perl
• Remote Oracle DB
• LDAP user authentication (RT::Authen::ExternalAuth + RT::Extension::LDAPImport)
• 7 operational queuess
• About 140 tickets per month
• Only internal users
• No modifications of the original source code

Customizations

Public interface for PIONIER queue (by courtesy of HEAnet) http://tickets.pionier.gov.pl

Customizations

Customized email notifications for various groups of users.

Migration

• Cross dependencies between system space (binary packets) and perl

space (CPAN)

• Documentation of RT itself is sufficient, but of plugins not. Extensive

testing of LDAP plugins was needed. E.g. there are two fully functional and independent passwords for users: one form LDAP and one from RT DB

• Complex DB schema. Everything remains in the DB forever.

– We want to develop a tool for editing and deleting of comments – Direct import of old tickets into new system was impossible (rt command line tool was used)

• „Object oriented” code in perl is terrible to read
• Polish translation of RT interface is incomplete and often misleading
• Small possibilities of ticket list customization on dashboards (e.g. font

color according to ticket state)

Lessons learnt

• Even with a small „client” (4 NOC engineers) requirements constantly

changing

• „If default settings will not be sufficient we will change them later” is a

bad idea (notifications, lifecycle, permissions)

• Most of users requests are about reproducing functionalities and ways
• f using of the previous system

Thank you