1. A Brief Introduction of RT
SCC
12/6/2018

2. Ticketing System In order to resolve a problem... – Who wants what?
– Who's going to work on this?
– When did they ask, when was it done?
– How much time did it take (billing, hours)?
– What's left to do?
– Everything is summarized and presented in a simple and intuitive manner.

3. RT: Advantages • Open source and free • Heavily used and tested
• Very active development
• Quite flexibile
• Web interface and via CLI

4. RT: Disadvantages • A bit tricky to install the first time...
• It's powerful, so you'll need to spend
some time learning how it works.

5. Ways RT Gets Used • Helpdesk • Network operations • Bug tracking
• Customer service
• Project management

6. Essential Functionality
• Several interfaces
– Web, CLI, , etc.
• Multiuser
– At different levels: admin, general user, gues
• Authentication and authorization
• Event history
• Handles dependencies
• Notifications

7. User Creation • Create a userid for each member.
• Assign privileges to each user.

8. Create Groups • Create groups of users:
–Administering privileges by group is more efficient that doing so for each
user.

9. Create Queues • Create queues for problem categories – For example
• security
• accounts
• connectivity
– Assign users to each queue
• Different between AdminCC and CC

10. Scrips (actions) • For each queue create automatic actions
– There is a group of scrips that apply to all queues.
• Possible to customize per queue or globally
• “scrips” are “snippets of Perl code”

11. Extensions • You can extend the functionality of RT. For example:
– Send daily s to remind users of tickets that have not been “taken”
– Send daily s to each user reminding them of their pending tickets.
– Periodically increment ticket priority
– You can execute commands via •

12. The RT CLI • Simple perl script • Usually lives in /usr/bin
• Can run locally or remotely
• Uses HTTP (or HTTPS)
• Uses TicketSQL for Searching
• Talks to RT's "REST" interface
• Scriptable

13. CLI
$ export RTUSER=root
$ export RTSERVER=

14. CLI
$rt help
...     - rt help usage         (syntax information)     - rt help objects       (how to specify objects)     - rt help actions       (a list of possible actions)     - rt help types         (a list of object types)     - rt help config        (configuration details)     - rt help examples      (a few useful examples)     - rt help topics        (a list of help topics)
$rt help actions
    - list          (list objects matching some condition)     - show          (display object details)     - edit          (edit object details)     - create        (create a new object)

15. CLI examples rt list -i "status='new'"
rt show -t ticket 42 -f id,subject,status
rt create -t ticket
rt show ticket/3
rt show ticket/1,5-8,42 -f id,queue,subject,status,priority
rt show ticket/9/history
rt show ticket/9/attachments
rt show ticket/9/attachments/11/content
rt correspond -m "The vendor is supplying a patch" ticket/15
rt comment -m "This is what I see" -a screenshot.png ticket/15
rt edit ticket/47

16. Scripting RT Shell Functions rtspam( ) {
rt edit ticket/$1 set queue=spam status=deleted }
rtresolve( ) {
rt edit ticket/$1 set status=resolved
rtshow( ) {
rt show ticket/$1
$ rtresolve 12345
Ticket Resolved.

17. Scripting RT Shell Aliases
alias rtspam='rt edit ticket/$1 set queue=spam status=deleted'
alias rttop='rt ls -i "priority > 70 and status != resolved" | rt show - -f id,subject'

18. Scripting RT MIME use Email::Simple; my $tno = $ARGV[0];
my $ticket = `rt show ticket/$tno`;
my $tobj = :Simple->new($ticket);
print "Ticket $tno was requested by ", $tobj->header("requestors"),
" on ", $tobj->header("created"), ".\n";

19. References • Best Practical Web site http://bestpractical.com/rt