Not sure if I am posting this in the right place or not. Basically a year ago when I started working at this organization we had about 50 users and it was fairly easy to manage trouble tickets using email as I was the only IT Support guy. We are approaching 100 users and the needs of the organization are rapidly growing as we grow. It has become evident that we need an IT trouble ticket system, certainly as talk arises of us possibly hiring another IT person or getting a couple of interns to work with us as my focus shifts from a less support role and more of an overall IT management role, a task that I am not prepared for but hoping that I can make the best of things and continue to help the IT department grow.

With that said, I have looked at two Open Source options otrs.org and osTicket. Both seem like good solutions and both seem to do about the same thing. However, I thought I would ask the Linux community since most of you guys might have had experience in the IT field and have used ticketing systems. If you have a pay solution you really like please feel free to suggest that, I am only looking at Open Source as I try to go open source when possible.

Hi.

I'd go with OTRS. I've used HP OpenView, BMC Remedy and various in-house systems, and nothing has come close to it. Web-based ticket systems are so, so, so much better than native-client systems, as long as you've got a tabbed browser handy (even IE 8 would be OK). I've never used osTicket, though, so I can't comment on it.

As a data point, the 7 man team I was in used to use OTRS to track software support tickets for around 15 software products and services (it varied), for the global user base of a large Unix vendor. The same OTRS instance also handled tickets for a monitoring team, and 3 language teams. The machine that hosted it was a 1U 500MHz box, and it barely even broke a sweat.

I wish I could ditch my current ticket system and go back to OTRS.

Dave

not sure about the Open Source options as my work seems to like to spend gobs of money. We use a system called Track-It! that seems to work well enough and will soon be moving to a new system called Foot Prints (which I believe is web based).

we use SpiceWorks and it works pretty well.

I have used Spiceworks for an international company and it worked wonders, even had it served off the main IT helpdesk pc. There wasn't much performance hit unless it was performing a forced update of all nodes.

I have used RT in the past with success. It's fairly easy to add functionality for full controll via email in addition to the web interface. I had it set up to do queue escelation and ticket reminders as well. Now if you like django check out jutda. It has the obligatory web interface as well as a full API for hooking into other systems. It can also be fully controlled via email and can use an imap box for incomming ticket.

I mention the full email control because if your going from using email to a ticketing system having something with full email control will ease the transition for both you and your users. The web interface will be a feature add where users can go to see a full history and check current status without digging throug email. But as far as communicating IMHO it's easiest to just use email that happens to go through the ticketing system for tracking.

Thanks for all the suggestions, playing with SpiceWorks and going to install OTRS on a virtual server later for testing. I appreciate the input!