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GGUS:Ticketing System Recommendation FAQ

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GGUS wiki / GGUS FAQ / GGUS Documentation / GGUS Helpdesk

GGUS ticketing system recommendations

Updated
2011-10-12

Purpose

This document provides a technical description on how to interface any other ticketing system with GGUS. It describes the interface of choice and gives some examples for tools that can be used to reach this goal. It does not give a description of the things to be done on management level before implementing an interface to GGUS. As the things to be done on management level are currently not documented please submit a [ticket] or add your request for interfacing GGUS system to the GGUS shopping list at https://savannah.cern.ch/support/?func=additem&group=esc. The GGUS shopping list is a savannah project for collecting and discussing change requests for GGUS system.

Current situation

In the past many interfaces of GGUS to other systems have been implemented. Each of them was unique in its kind. They can be classified into three different groups:

  • Interfaces based on email for both communication directions, from GGUS to the remote system and from the remote system to GGUS.
  • Interfaces based on email for communication from GGUS to the remote system and on web services for communications from the remote system to GGUS
  • Interfaces based on web services for both communication directions, from GGUS to the remote system and from the remote system to GGUS.

The goal of GGUS is to reduce the number of different interfaces for reducing complexity and maintenance effort in the system.

Interfaces based on email exchange

Email interfaces can be set up rather quick as the necessary infrastructure (mail servers etc.) is already available and ticketing tools are usually able to create and send emails. Using mail templates seems to be no problem. The receiving system of the emails has to parse the incoming mails for either adding the content to an existing ticket or creating a new one. To ease parsing the mails have to stick to an agreed format. Email exchange is sometimes not as reliable as necessary. Delays in email transmission or loss of emails can disturb the synchronization between the ticketing systems and confuse people. Manual interventions are necessary to synchronize the different ticketing systems again.

Interfaces based on SOAP web services

Web service interfaces are very reliable. The ticketing systems are synchronized permanently. Failing web services throw an error message at once. So the user gets notified about it. Most of the ticketing tools mentioned in chapter XXXXX don't provide web services out of the box. Some implementation work is needed for a web service interface.

Recommended System

Regarding the advantages and disadvantages described in sections XXXXX and XXXXX an email interface can be set up rather quick but is not that reliable. SAOP web services are very reliable but need some implementation work. However the goal of GGUS is to avoid setting up new email interfaces and to replace existing ones. If setting up a new ticketing system GGUS recommends using a ticketing tool which allows the implementation of SOAP web services. RT is an example for such a tool.

Tools

The GGUS system is based on BMC Remedy Action Request System (ARS). Remedy ARS is able to provide web services as well as to consume web services. So data transfer can be done by web services in both directions. For implementing a help desk system to be interfaced with GGUS system a couple of tools are available. Tools which are already interfaced in production are:

  • Xoops/Xhelp,
  • OneOrZero ,
  • Footprints and
  • RequestTracker(RT).

Xoops/Xhelp

Xoops is used for the Italian (NGI_IT) ticketing system. The SOAP web services have to be implemented additionally. More information about xoops is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xoops.

Footprints

The footprints ticketing system is used by the OSG in the US. The SOAP web services have to be implemented additionally. More information is available at http://www.numarasoftware.com/footprints/.

Request Tracker(RT)

There are several web service interfaces between GGUS and RT instances using SOAP web services. They are in production mode since over a year and are working properly. The implementation of the web service interface in RT is described at https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/GGUSRT:GGUS-RT_Interface_Task_Force. Further information is also available at http://bestpractical.com/rt/.

SOAP web services provided by OneOrZero

Information on OneOrZero is available at http://www.oneorzero.com/. As an example for web services provided by a remote system the web services of NGI_IBERGRID help desk system are described here. The NGI_IBERGRID web services use a document/literal wrapped style. This style offers enough information on the WSDL and SOAP message and the operations and their parameters. The only restriction is the impossibility to use overloading (same name for operations with different parameters). The operations related to the communication between GGUS web services and the NGI_IBERGRID helpdesk web services are the following (the input and output fields for the operations can be obtained from the WSDL document http://swegus.ific.uv.es/SWEws).

What if I have questions which are not dealt with by this FAQ?

Open a GGUS ticket 

indicating that it should be directed at the GGUS team.

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