Best Practical's RT: Request Tracker is a highly flexible open source solution with an active user community.

by Jeff Goldman [January 18, 2006]

Jesse Vincent first developed the ticketing system RT: Request Tracker in the mid-'90s as a summer intern at Utopia, Inc.—and at the end of the summer, he took RT with him and released it as open source solution. "They didn't see a ticketing system as being directly related to their web development business, and so they let me walk away with it," he says. "They were quite supportive."

Best Practical RT (617) 812-0745 sales@bestpractical.com

In the years that followed, Vincent began to start an arts-related non-profit organization—with spectacularly bad timing. "We got our 501(c)(3) status from the feds on September 7th, 2001—which made it a really bad year to be starting a non-profit," he says. And so, in October of 2001, Vincent founded Best Practical Solutions to further develop and support RT.

RT is particularly popular with dot-coms and ISPs, Vincent says, because it was originally designed for network administration. But it now gets used for a wide variety of applications beyond helpdesk or customer service.

In fact, Vincent says, he enjoys seeing all the innovative ways that RT is now being put to use. "People use it for things that I never would have conceived of it being useful for," he says. "Because it's open source, that means everyone who uses it gets all the code, which means it's really hackable. So we see people show up with all kinds of different customizations and configurations."

The solution, he says, has thus far been translated into 15 languages. "The first translation was Chinese—we worked with a company in Taipei to do the internationalization and translation," Vincent says. "It was quite something, the first time RT's UI came up in a language I don't speak."

Scalability and services
RT was first designed, Vincent says, for a team of two to handle requests from a community of 30 users. But once it became open source, he says, he was surprised to find that it was being used for much larger deployments. "There are folks now putting 10,000 tickets a day through it, folks with millions of tickets in their databases," he says.

The solution back-ends into a standard SQL database, which provides a lot of room for scalability. "People are running it with multiple Web server front-ends talking to a database cluster on the back-end," Vincent says. "But there are still teams using it for two people handling internal requests by themselves."

One of the best things about RT, Vincent says, is the user community. "There are several public mailing lists of folks who use the tool all the time, and contribute changes, and find and fix bugs and help each other out," he says. "If you want to do something in RT, it's probably the case that somebody else has already done it."

Because RT is free to install and run, Best Practical makes its money only through the services it provides—including custom development, training, installation and support. Support pricing is listed on the company's website, and includes a number of different pricing plans ranging from $1,500 per quarter to $120,000 per year.

Custom development, Vincent says, can vary from minor adjustments to a complete redesign of the interface. "For the people who do security and incident response for British academia (JANET), we built an entirely new front-end to RT called RT for Incident Response—which they then allowed us to open-source," he says.

Most ISPs, Vincent says, don't require installation support—a quick phone call is generally all that's needed. "What we usually recommend is that they do all the touching—they make sure that they've got everything installed in their standard way—because the last thing we want is for an ISP to not have the knowledge in-house to replicate one of their systems," he says.

Releases and flexibility
Vincent says new releases of RT are usually driven by bug fixed and new features. "If a given release is rock solid, it might be a couple of months between point releases," he says. "The version control repository for RT is wide open to the public, so anyone can see what we're doing day by day and grab the latest and greatest bug fixes if they absolutely need something."

Stable point releases, Vincent says, generally come every one to three months. "We're just in the process of getting RT 3.6 ready for release," he says. "That includes some new reporting tools, a couple of new types of custom fields, user customizable front pages so each user can have the searches that they want to see pop up as they log in, and a couple of new extension mechanisms."

Jos Boumans is a senior developer at the European ISP XS4ALL. The ISP first began using RT, Boumans says, in its abuse department—and the customer service team soon saw how useful the solution was and took it on themselves. "It sort of spread as a virus through the company," Boumans says. "Everybody said, 'This is really handy: we want to use it as well!'"

Once people began using RT, Boumans says, the company examined it more closely to decide if they wanted to migrate to a different solution. "We actually found that with the flexibility RT gives us—we have a fairly large development department which programs in Perl, the same language RT is written in—and with good ties to the RT developer community, that it was a very logical choice for us," he says.

The solution's flexibility, Boumans says, is its greatest strength. "It presents itself as a ticketing application, but because of the underlying logic and the engine that goes with it, basically anything that you can define in terms of workflow can be done with it," he says. As a result, Boumans says, XS4ALL has been able to automate and interconnect a wide range of processes within the organization.

Customizing the solution for each of those processes, Boumans says, was relatively easy to do. "The underlying mechanism was the same, but the custom actions that we put on top of it made it quite customized for whatever that department was working with," he says. "So everybody got what they wanted from it."

— End

Related articles:
	[Nov. 3, 2005]	Common Sense in Selling Services
	[April 16, 2004]	Beating the Branded ISPs
	[Sept. 10, 1999]	Keeping Customers: Part 1—Quality of Service

Online resources:
	Trouble Ticketing Systems Directory
	Quick Reference Chart