Open Source Trouble Ticket system help - OTRS or other

July 15, 2006 11:11 AM

Open Source Ticket system - I am looking at OTRS, but cannot figure out if the system can send alerts to a supervisor/co-worker if a ticket is not resolved within a certain period of time. Any pointers? Any other open source trouble ticket systems out there that can do this?
posted by bright77blue to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Best answer: Not sure on the first part of your question.. as to the second:

One truly opensource application is RT (RequestTracker). We've had it running in an enterprise level environment for years as a combination Sales Queue and Request environment. It can certainly do what you're requesting (sending alerts). My only reservation about it is that it can be tricky to maintain - the wiki that runs their documentation site is often defaced, so it can be frustrating to get an answer you need right now.

A commercial application (although very cheap at ~300 for a lifetime license) is Kayako. It's "open source" in that after you pay for it, you can modify it to your hearts content. It has a decent rules engine (and a lot of features if you're handling a bunch of inbound requests).
posted by Vantech at 12:09 PM on July 15, 2006

mysql 5.1 (current release is 5.0) is supposed to introduce an "event scheduler". which would easily allow this sort of thing. but I also hear that this feature may not end up going missing from 5.1.

so it seems likely that this sort of feature may be absent from existing mysql/php based ticketing systems. or else done in a somewhat hackish manner (e.g. cronjob, windows task scheduler, a routine that runs date checks every time any user logs in, etc.)

one good thing about open source ticketing systems is that you can make it have that feature even if it doesn't. any of the abovementioned not-quite-kludges would work just fine.

btw my personal recommendation is glpi. works great alonside ocs. I am rolling out a test phase of the two right now and so far the managers love it and are even thinking of all sorts of creative new uses for it.
posted by dorian at 1:28 PM on July 15, 2006

er
s/may not end/may end/
duh
posted by dorian at 1:29 PM on July 15, 2006

ps I don't think postgresql has time-based triggers either.

but oracle certainly does and I believe db2 does as well.
posted by dorian at 1:35 PM on July 15, 2006

RT is pretty spiffy, and yes, I think it can auto-escalate un-picked-up tickets.

Yes, it is also complicated, but if you need to depend on it for commercial work, Jesse will be more than happy to let you pay him for support.

You said open-source, not free-beer, so perhaps that would be a useful solution for you.
posted by baylink at 1:47 PM on July 15, 2006

elaborating a little on what I mentioned, a daily windows or unix task that calls a php script which does a query something like

"SELECT id from tickets WHERE date < DATE_SUB(CURDATE(),INTERVAL 3 DAY);"

and mails a link (to each resulting ticket (anything more than 3 days old, in this case) to whomever, would be easy enough. probably should put a extra condition on that WHERE, that the ticket be open/unresolved, etc.

hm this is a nice idea. I think I will set it up for our own system at work next week. ha.

thanks!
posted by dorian at 2:18 PM on July 15, 2006

Eventum, the issue-tracking system used by the MySQL support team, supports reminders, which can be set up for issue escalation.
posted by jimw at 4:18 PM on July 15, 2006

Response by poster: Hi Everyone

Thanks! I think Kayako is the way for us. Good mix between price and functionality.

Once again thank you.

BB
posted by bright77blue at 8:09 AM on July 16, 2006