RT (Request Tracker) Is A Free Web Based Ticketing System - Installation & Dashboard Notifications

RT (Request Tracker) is a free, open source help desk software that's designed to handle the ticketing capabilities available in other packages like BMC Remedy.

Help desk software ticketing systems assist IT departments and other organizations track their workflow, tasks, knowledge, and assets. They have become an integral part of most help desk departments. For a company starting out, popular commercial help desk programs such as BMC Remedy ARS, Clarify, Quantum, and CA Service Desk can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to configure. For example, a frequent complaint of Remedy ARS is that it takes a lot of effort to administer and customize.

An IT department in a small, but growing company may want to consider free open source help desk software before spending thousands on a commercial help desk software package. In many cases, the free open source software does everything that's needed.

RT - Open Source Help Desk Software

RT, which stands for Request Tracker, is an free, enterprise grade, open source software package that does most of things done by bigger commercial help desk software such as Remedy and Service Desk. It does the usual things such as open tickets and log all activity on a ticket with an easy to use web GUI.

With RT, it's easy to open a new ticket. Just send an email to the RT system. By default, all future transactions and notifications are sent via email to all involved parties. That's the way it should be with most transactions. There is a way to put in a note without notifying the customer, which allows for internal comments which should not be shared with the customer.

RT is designed for team collaboration. Queues are set up for each team, which in turn can be picked up by any member of a team. For example, the hiring of a new employee may involve several IT staff members. A ticket would first be sent to the Unix queue to create a Unix account. Then the Unix person would reassign the ticket to the Windows queue to set up an Active Directory account. All of the work for that new employee would be contained in one ticket, so it's easy to tell what's been done and what still needs to be completed.

If that isn't enough, it's possible to add dependencies such as another ticket. For example, a ticket for a server could depend on the decommission of another server, which itself is a separate ticket. In this example, a dependency with the decommission ticket can be added to the original request for a server.

Open Source Asset Tracking Software

RT does have an asset tracking module, but it has no way of retrieving the information on IT assets by itself. This means somebody needs to type all of the asset information in manually. For a small IT shop, that may not be a huge inconvenience because of the small number of IT assets. As an asset tracking software, RT is pretty limited in its abilities. Those that need more may need to move to a commercial product at some point in the future.

Request Tracker (RT) Software Installation Requirements

The following software packages are required to run RT:

Operating system: Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, Solaris / another Unix-like operating system

Database: MariaDB, PostgreSQL MySQL and Oracle

Web server: Apache, nginx, Lighttpd / FastCGI

It should take no more than a day for an experienced system administrator to install a fully functional default RT system. Best Practical, the organization that develops RT, also sells support contracts as well as installation and development services for those that need it.

How to Download and Install

• Download RT from http://bestpractical.squarespace.com/download-page
• Run the following command:
  tar xzvf rt.tar.gz -C /tmp
• Run the configure script.
  ./configure --help
• Then check for missing dependencies by running:
  make testdeps
• Be sure everything was installed properly.
  make testdeps
• Run
  /opt/rt4/sbin/rt-server
  then follow the instructions. Then type:
  make initialize-database

RT Dashboard Notifications

Setting up a New Dashboard

Click Tools and then Dashboards

Click the new Dashboard

First type the name of the dashboard in the case "Outstanding Invoices" then click "Create."

Creating a New Saved Search

Deleting Dashboards

The bottom line is that RT works well for all but the largest and most complex environments. Aside from the time investment in installation and initial setup, it should not take long for most organizations to get RT up and running.

---

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

---