7.1. Network and Server Operations

Yoyodyne's Operations group consists primarily of systems and network administrators (admins). They manage all of the computing and network infrastructure at Yoyodyne and were responsible for bringing RT into the organization. They use RT as an internal tool to track the work they need to do and the work they've already done.

System and network admins use the Network and Server Operations queue to track everything that goes on with Yoyodyne's technical infrastructure. An admin opens a ticket for anything that needs to be done, whether or not there's a problem involved. By updating the relevant ticket each time anyone works an issue, the team makes sure that any individual admin always can find out about the status of an issue or project, just by checking the ticket. For example, finding out what's changed on the server bonzai.yoyodyne.com in the past month is as simple as searching for all the tickets in the Network and Server Operations queue that mention "bonzai" in the Hardware device affected custom field and have been updated in the last month.

7.1.1. Custom Fields

Yoyodyne's staff added a number of custom fields for tickets in the Network and Server Operations queue.

Hardware device affected

Yoyodyne's staff fill this FreeformMultiple field with the hostname of any piece of network hardware that this ticket references. If the ticket is about an issue on the email server bigbooty.yoyodyne.com, staff fill in that name. If the ticket is about the network link between the WAN routers dimension3.yoyodyne.com and dimension8.yoyodyne.com, the sysadmins fill in both of those hostnames.

Severity

RT lets you track the priority of each ticket in the system on a general numeric scale. Yoyodyne categorizes their systems issues with a SelectSingle custom field on a much simpler scale: Critical issues prevent many people from doing their jobs. Severe issues prevent a few people from doing their jobs. Important issues may inconvenience a number of users but don't prevent anyone from doing his job. Normal issues inconvenience only a few users. Minor issues are things that easily can be deferred to later; they don't inconvenience anyone and don't have to be done anytime soon. Sometimes an issue will be upgraded to a higher severity level by a manager. For example, if the CEO's email is unavailable while all other users' mail is unaffected, it is likely that the VP of Operations will open a Critical ticket. In theory, this works the other way as well, but Yoyodyne's staff has never seen an issue reported with a lower Severity than it merits.

Location

This FreeformSingle field lets Yoyodyne staff quickly record a physical location for a given ticket. This could be something like "machine room at the rocket test site" or "the loading dock at the main warehouse."

Vendor Ticket #

Yoyodyne uses this FreeformSingle field to track what ticket number their network provider or hardware vendor has opened for a particular issue. Not every ticket will have a vendor ticket number.

7.1.2. Groups

Yoyodyne's staff created a single user-defined group in RT called Sysadmins. This group contains all of the systems and network administrators.

7.1.3. Scrips

The Network and Server Operations queue uses the scrips outlined in Table 7-1.

Table 7-1. Network and Server Operations scrips

Condition	Action	Template
On Create	Page Admins if severity is critical	Pager
On Correspond	Notify AdminCcs	Admin Correspondence
On Correspond	Notify Requestors	Correspondence
On Create	Autoreply to Requestors	Autoreply
On Comment	Notify AdminCcs	Admin Comment

7.1.4. ACLs

An ACL, or Access Control List, is a flexible and powerful way to manage access rights, based on membership in a list that has the appropriate rights assigned to it. Lists can be assigned to one another to create complex and useful access groups to suit the level of control detail required.

To allow all staff at Yoyodyne to submit tickets to RT, the administrators granted the Privileged group the following rights:

     SeeQueue     CreateTicket     ReplyToTicket 

Yoyodyne's Sysadmins are able to do just about everything to tickets in the Network and Server Operations queue, so the RT administrators granted the Sysadmin group the following rights:

     ShowTicket     ShowTicketComments     ShowOutgoingEmail     Watch     WatchAsAdminCc     CreateTicket     CommentOnTicket     OwnTicket     ModifyTicket     DeleteTicket     TakeTicket     StealTicket