1. RIPE ncc 25th June 1998 1 CENTR Workshop The RIPE NCC Request Tracking System Maldwyn G.T. Morris RIPE NCC

2. RIPE ncc 2 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 General Customer Request Handling System CustomersCustomers Staff Communications from customers Communications from staff

3. RIPE ncc 3 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 Less General System 1 CustomersCustomers Staff emails from customers emails from staff Mail System Human beings Programs Key Only work with emails Information Emails

4. RIPE ncc 4 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 Less General System 2 CustomersCustomers emails from customers emails from staff Mail System Request Tracking System Request Processing Staff Store Requests

5. RIPE ncc 5 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 Less General System 3 CustomersCustomers Request Processing Staff Request Mail System Request Tracking System General Mail Person General Mail System Pass General Enquries to other staff

6. RIPE ncc 6 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 Less General System 4 CustomersCustomers Request Processing Staff Request Mail System Request Tracking System Mail Distributor General Mail Person General Mail System One person to distribute mail

7. RIPE ncc 7 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 RIPE NCC Request Handling Now CustomersCustomers Hostmasters autohmdist Request Mail Handler/Distributor RTT General Mail Person General Mail System autohm - Request Pre-Processor humanhmdist - Problem Mail Handler Rtt query Web page Automate distribution - human to monitor Automate some request processing Customer status queries on web ack

8. RIPE ncc 8 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 RTT One ‘ticket’ per request, containing the following : m All Correspondence under that ticket: -Customer Emails -Acknowledgements to Customer -Replies to Customer from Staff Stored as files in Unix directories m Request Details: -Ticket Number -Customer -Type -Dates: Opened, Closed -Status -Log Messages -Handler -Origin -Links to Correspondence files Stored as Ticket record in SQL database

9. RIPE ncc 9 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 RTT Interfaces: rtt - command line xrtt - X Windows GUI Functions: Show a ticket Scan tickets Show pending tickets - per User Group Get a ticket Make a new ticket Change ticket details Show mails under tickets Add mails to ticket Reply to mails Add log messages to ticket

10. RIPE ncc 10 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 RTT Internal Programs rtt - command line - perl xrtt - GUI - perl/tk autohmdist - mail handler/distributor - perl autohm - request pre-processor - perl stt - standard reply generator - perl webrtt - customer ticket query - cgi perl External Programs mysql - ticket database mh - mail system

11. RIPE ncc 11 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 RTT Statistics m ~16000 tickets in system ( all tickets since March 1995 ) m ~35 new tickets per working day m ~130 customer mails per working day m ~6 mails per ticket including acks and replies m ~10% of mails not handled m ~50% of mails handled by hostmasters m ~40% handled by pre-processor robot m ~60 customer queries on web per working day m ~10 Hostmasters using system m generating ~3 user queries per week m Performance acceptable m Pentium II 233 Mhz, SCSI RAID

12. RIPE ncc 12 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 Observations m Speed of rtt was a problem m Used database (msql) m Then used faster database (mysql) and faster hardware m User education important m Mail robots tricky to write m Boring work automated pleases users m Information on web & quick error checks please customers m Statistics please managers m Always a demand for new ticket fields m Always a demand for more intelligent automatic mail handling

13. RIPE ncc 13 CENTR Workshop 25th June 1998 URLs m http://www.ripe.net/cgi-bin/rttquery m http://www.terena.nl/task-forces/tf-etinu/survey_results.html m http://www.mcs.anl.gov/home/evard/papers/req.html m http://www.stonekeep.com/ m http://nsipower.com/ m http://www.iac.honeywell.com/Pub/Tech/CM/index.html m http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~blair/bookmarks.html m http://dxcoms.cern.ch:8000/ttshelp/ttsGuideContents.html m http://www.eng.utah.edu/rust/ m ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu:/pub/sysadmin/tracking/sun-managers-summary m http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~curt/wgnats/webgnats.html m http://www.helpdesk.com/ m http://www.benchin.com/$index.wcgi/cat/1183 m http://www.softsearch.com m http://www.grdata.com/products/helpdesk/helpdesk.html m http://www.grdata.com/