Request Tracker User Guide

Chapter 2:

Administration

There are two levels of administration in Request Tracker: system and queue. The majority of administration work centers around privileges – managing users and what they are allowed to do.

System Administration

The IS Technical Services group is responsible for overall administration of the Request Tracker application.

They will work closely with Queue Administrators in creating new queues, modifying existing queues, creating/modifying custom fields, configuring notifications, and maintaining users and groups. Details about how to request these are available on the Request Tracker website, see Chapter 8: Support.
Any global configurations or customizations that are needed are performed or coordinated by this group.
They also provide general support and training for the application. For information about this, go to Chapter 8: Support.

Queue Administration/Management

Queue Administrators are responsible for managing their queues. They decide how they want their queues configured and work with the System Administrator to accomplish this. They decide who will access their queue and what privileges they will have. They decide what notifications there will be in addition to the Global notifications.

Queue Administrators should also be managing the tickets. They need to make sure tickets are being assigned and that stalled tickets are not forgotten. If there are a lot of tickets in the queues, they may need to meet periodically with the functional owners to determine priorities.
Most importantly, Queue Administrators/Managers decide how they want the queue users to interact with RT. This can be done informally or formally with a set of standards or procedures. Because individual Queue Administrators will have different ways of working with their users, there isn’t one standard method or procedure. It is the Queue Administrator’s responsibility to determine what works best for their queue and communicate that to their users.

Privileges

To be able to do anything in Request Tracker, you must be granted rights or privileges. When a new user signs onto the RT system via web-interface, an account is created for them automatically as a privileged user. The Queue Administrator can now add them to an existing user or technical support group allowing them all the rights that have been given that group for that queue.

Rights can be granted to individual users (highly discouraged), to groups of users, or to roles (Owner, Requestor, CC or AdminCC). In the IS implementation of RT, we do not normally grant rights to individual users as it becomes a nightmare to keep track of and for ease of maintenance. We grant rights to groups and roles. Individual users are assigned to these groups and roles, which makes for much less time and effort on maintenance.
Queue Administrators determine what groups they want to access their queues and what rights to assign them. They may choose to have a group for the development staff who have the rights to create new tickets and modify existing tickets. There may be another group for the users who have the right to create new tickets, but only view existing tickets.
What you see in Request Tracker and what you are allowed to do is all dependent on your rights. For example, if you don’t have the right to “Steal” a ticket, you will not have the option displayed to you.
If you have problems doing something in Request Tracker, it is very likely to be due to your rights. You should always check with the Queue Administrator first before reporting problems to the RT support staff.

Chapter 3:

Logging In

Request Tracker is a web application. It works very well with the Mozilla web browser. Problems have been encountered when using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE); therefore, we do not recommend you use IE and we do not support it.
The URL for Request Tracker in IS is: https://whatever/
You will be greeted with the following login screen:

Login using your LDAP username and password.
Click on Logout in the upper right corner to log out of Request Tracker. This will take you back to the login screen.

If you find that you can sign on into RT but have no other rights or privileges, then contact the person who manages/administers the RT Queue you wish to see and ask to be added to a group that will allow you the privileges you need.

Chapter 4:

Home Page

Immediately after logging in to RT, you'll be looking at the home page.

Note: You'll find that many items are separately clickable on the RT home page navigation bar, such as Simple Search, Tickets, Tools, Preferences, and Approval. The Approval selection is not supported at LBNL. At the upper right of the screen you will also see a few other choices; Support, and Logout. Below the navigation bar is the “RT at a Glance” display, which will vary, based on your individual selections when you customize your home page.

We will start with the selections offered at the top right of the page;

Support: This is a link to another web page that offers several informative selections for helping you use RT. There you will find a list of current RT Queues, Custom Fields, Standards for using RT, Documents (FAQ, Glossary, this guide), Training announcements, Project Status announcements, and Technical Support information.

Logout: This selection gets you out of RT and back to your browser.

Navigation Bar (top blue bar):

Simple Search; This is a search function for finding tickets by either the ticket id, Queue name, User Id, Requestors (E_mail address), and words in content (attachments). Enter on the line the Id, keyword, or value of what you are looking for and RT will find the tickets related to what you entered.