Product Information
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Name: | Request Tracker |
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| Website: | http://www.bestpractical.com/rt | |
| Category: | Ticketing System | |
| Date: | 16-Feb-07 |
Request Tracker, or better known simply as RT, is touted as an enterprise grade ticketing system. In the world of free ticketing systems, most of us only really have 2 options left – OTRS and RT. RT is a perl based and uses your favorite SQL database. On the front-end, it can take advantage of either mod_perl or FastCGI. Like most ticketing systems, it has a number of ways to create, update and manipulate tickets. Its front-end is a web-based system using Perl Mason for HTML construction. Other input methods include email and userland binaries.
Speaking of Perl and Mason, this is perhaps RT’s biggest downside. Perl for HTML construction isn’t the fastest or most popular thing on the market. However, RT does have some nice features we’ve come to expect from enterprise ticketing systems. Inbound emails generate new tickets and subsequent correspondences are nicely threaded accordingly. The built-in system comes with a business logic implementation method calls ‘Scrips’. Here one can perform basic to moderate ticket manipulation and automatic email correspondence based on predefined conditions and actions.
The extensibility and customization of RT isn’t too bad, nor is it necessarily fun. Thankfully, the system was developed with an object-oriented mindset. Hence its fairly straight forward to overload function calls and alter the UI. Best Practical, which appears to be the consulting arm of RT’s author, Jesse Vincent, also provides a few add on modules. These include a FAQ manager type of knowledge base and an incident response tool. Outside of these modules, the asset tracker add-on from a third party rounds out the best of RT. Combine the base RT with asset tracking and you have an instant ITIL service desk tool.
Installation of RT is par for the course. First, get your software installed – webserver components, a databases, perl and a ton of PMs. From there it’s an expected set of steps from database schema, config files and base setup via the web UI. The security configurations of user access control and custom fields can at times be a bit confusing. Best to create yourself a few test accounts with various permissions and run a full set of tests before going into production.
Product Rating
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The community around RT has been pretty stable and active for a few years. The basic rt-users email list ranges from 300 to 600 messages a month. The online installation docs are in wiki format. Despite the fact that I despise install docs in wiki format, the wiki users are actively contributing.
Personally, I’ve been a user of RT for many years and always recommend it as an option when looking at ticketing systems. My one suggestion is to realize that Perl Mason is slow, so allow for enough horse power and be ready to do some FastCGI tweaking. RT is licensed under the terms of version 2 of the GNU GPL.
Enjoy the Free Lunch.
(This is part of a regular series where I discuss free information security products, tools, methodologies, hardware, etc. For a description of this column and to read other Free Lunch menus, check out the category archive. Remember, this is not an endorsement by nCircle. Please see my FAQ.)
