Managed OTRS enables GÉANT to meet formerly hard-to-fulfill SLAs, relying on the internal operation of the system

Agents additionally used a separate mailbox. Without the possibility of uniting all available information as well as the email communication regarding problems in one central place, efficient workflows were hard to establish. “Providing high IT connectivity services and network monitoring solutions also means we needed to manage lots of small research projects with many different types of data. This required a reliable but also flexible software which makes all the project communication transparent,” explains Tony Barber, Head of GÉANT’s Operations Center. Meeting SLAs for internal and external issues processed by GÉANT plays an important role for the network’s daily business.

OTRS Tickets are used to track internal work (change & service requests, problems) and external issues (customer support issues like service requests and incidents). “We make extensive use of the SLA capabilities in combination with the workflow possibilities in OTRS. This guarantees that the issue will be attended in time and helps to follow a consistent approach regarding problem solving and standardized output,“ says Barber. After introducing OTRS, NOC staff experienced that the automated features, used along with the email/ticket functionality, freed up a lot of time and helped to provide an easy-to-understand communication flow. Now all related issues are collected in only one place, something that was not possible before.

The GÉANT community includes 40 partners from across Europe, the IT systems of which should be accessible using the community-developed federated authentication system.

How could this be achieved on a system that was not managed by a GÉANT community member?

GÉANT’s systems programming team, in conjunction with OTRS Group’s support staff, developed a supportable solution for integrating the community-wide eduGAIN authentication solution into OTRS. OTRS already supported Active Directory and OTRS Group appreciated that a further mechanism could be supported providing GÉANT with its required solution. This deployment was the first time eduGAIN authentication has been deployed on a server not hosted by a GÉANT community member. It shows OTRS Group is able to flex to the needs of its customers.

When the pan-European research and education network decided to replace their prior ticketing system, they first carried out a survey among the associated organizations. The result showed that many were already using open source tools and some members had already had good experiences with OTRS. GÉANT opted for cloud-based OTRS because OTRS Data Centers are located in Europe and because OTRS – even though it is not such a big company – offers a system supported by experts 24/7/365. “For us this means, above all, having a quite personal relationship with the OTRS Employees, who fully accept and understand our business as a very unique organization. We evaluated various service providers in the Help Desk sector and are pleased to have found real experts in our partners at OTRS whose focus lies explicitly on the continued development of ticketing software.” Another advantage Barber points out when comparing OTRS with the former system: “OTRS is also provided with a dashboard, which we use extensively to track the current status of incidents. So we are able to see exactly how many tickets there are in every phase at just one glance.”