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1 Introduction to Request Tracker2 Terminology
1 Introduction to Request Tracker
Request Tracker is a trouble ticketing system. It lets a group of people intelligently and efficiently manage requests from a community of users. RT is used by systems administrators, customer support staffs, NOCs, developers and even marketing departments. The basic model goes something like this:
- A user sends email requesting help
- RT sends the user an electronic ticket stub which the user can reference in further correspondence about this problem.
- At the same time, RT sends mail to the queue members containing the users request.
- A queue member takes ownership of a request and drafts a reply to the user, which RT records and forwards to the user.
- The queue member resolves the ticket and moves onto the next new ticket.
RT can be configured to suit specific site requirements, but the basic concepts and usage remains the same
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2 Terminology
- New: The ticket has never been viewed or acted upon.
- Open: The ticket has been viewed, and is being dealt with.
- Stalled: The ticket has been put on hold as it cannot presently be resolved. If there is any further correspondance, the ticket will automatically be reopened.
- Resolved: The ticket has been dealt with, and is no longer an issue.
- Dead: This indicates that the ticket was deleted. Usually tickets are only deleted in the case of duplicate requests or spam email.
2.1 Ticket
A Ticket contains all the information regarding a request, including who requested it, what action has been taken, its current status, and the details of the request.
Each ticket is identified by a unique ticket number. The terms ticket and request are used interchangably
2.1.1 Ticket Requestor
The user who created the request. He may or may not be a local system user.2.1.2 Ticket Status
A ticket will always have a status which may be:
Sites will sometimes have their own interpretation of each status.
2.2 Users
Everybody who interacts with RT is an user. There are different types of user which define the persons priviliges and associations with tickets and queue.2.2.1 Privileged users
Privileged users are user who can be granted rights and responsibilities. Typically they are the staff of the organisation using RT.2.2.2 Nonprivileged Users
These users cannot be granted rights, and cannot access the normal web interface. When an email is received by RT from an unknown user, RT will automatically create a nonprivilged user.2.3 Queue
A queue contains tickets generally of a similar nature, for example, a technical support queue.
Multiple queues may be set up, and each will have its own email address. So you might have one queue, noc@example.com, which is monitored by technical staff, and billing@example.com, which is used by accounts staff. Tickets may be moved between queues, so a tech could pass a ticket onto the accounts department once work has completed.
Also, queues can be configured differently, so the noc queue may issue an autoresponse when a ticket is created, whereas the accounts queue might be configured to prevent internal correspondance being sent to the requestor.
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