OTRS (Open source Ticket Requesting System)

OTRS is an open source ticketing system which provides best ticket management system at
very lower cost.
In OTRS I have learned admin features and created some common OTRS ticket work flow use
cases. I have worked out in three major areas those are Admin, Agent and Customer and made
some configurations on those areas. Here I listed below what I did in OTRS so far.

Customer Management
There are different types of users. I have maintained all the user accounts. Usually, Customer
raise a ticket via customer portal and they can see their past ticket information in that portal.
 Created customers and maintained customers information.
 Created customer users and also maintained all of their information.

Agents
Agents are the people who can login and attend all of the tickets, as well as the administrator of
the system. Agents can also have multiple roles. Agent job is to resolve the customer issue and
restore the service immediately.

Role of Agents
I have created some agents from admin side. Then I assigned roles to agents so when
customer raise a ticket agent can able to solve issues according to their roles.
We can classify agent roles in three categories.
 Type1 (Handle simple service requests)
 Type 2(Have permission to edit and close tickets)
 Type 3(Handle complex requests)

Admin Configurations
If we want to make any changes in OTRS, We will achieve that in admin area. I have done
some changes which are
 Email ticket template format
 Notifications to customer, admin and agent who is responsible for the ticket
 New ticket format
 Set size limit to attachment
 Prevented users from create account by themselves
 Updated all fields of ticket in admin page.
 Assign roles to agents
 Customized user portal

Service Management
Service management provides valuable IT services to its customers. ( Example: Service
request).

Use case example

A customer has raised a request saying that he could not access the server.
The screen throws an error message:
Enter a valid user name and password to access the service.

In this case that particular user cannot access the service but other users can use this service.
Here, It is an issue with user credentials (From change management perspective password
reset request is considered as a standard change which does not need any approval).

Incident Management
An incident is unplanned disruption or degradation of a service.

Use case example

A customer has raised a request saying that he could not access the server.

The screen throws an error message:

Unable to connect to the server.

There is a service disruption which is an incident. So, Raising an incident request does not need
any approval the user can access the service.

Problem Management
Problems are not incidents but the problem may raise an incident. In incident management we
find the solutions and restore the service immediately. Objective of problem management is to
find the root cause of the incidents as soon as possible and fix that problem permanently.

Let’s take a practical example,

You are driving your car to somewhere. Suddenly, you got a flat tire which disrupts your
transportation. So it’s an incident. Now you are replacing that damaged tire by spare tire. This is
a solution for that incident. But here the actual problem is flat tire so In order to fix this problem
permanently to avoid future incidents you have to repair that flat tire.

Use case Example

Once a user raised an incident request that is CPU is not working. The incident management
tried to solve that issue but they could not fix that. So, The support team replaced the user CPU
and closed the user ticket.
Now Problem management should find the cause of that incident and fix the problem
permanently to avoid future incident.

Change Management
The objective of change management is to enable beneficial changes to be made with minimum
disruption to IT services.

Use case Example

Assume users are prohibited to download files from internet but one user requests admin for
download permission. After considering the rules of change management admin will accept or
reject the request.

Dashboard and Reports

On Progress
 Analyzing dashboard to customize better.
 Preparing to efficiently track all the reports of users and tickets.