CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Help Desks CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #1 Topics 1. Help Desk Management 2. Help Desk Software 3. Workflow 4. Trend Analysis CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #2 Help Desk Life CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #3 1
Types of Helpdesks Physical Walk-up counter Virtual Phone help E-mail or web-based request system Unofficial Visit sysadmin A in morning, B in afternoon. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #4 Help Desk Size Expressed as Customer:SA ratio. 50:1 for a R&D organization to 100,000:1 for an e-commerce site Conflicting interests Management wants a larger ratio. Customers want a smaller ratio. If ratio too large, customers do their own SA. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #5 Scope of Coverage What is supported? Hardware, OS, applications, networking. How are unsupported platforms handled? Who is supported? Department, location. Where are the customers? Customers on the road, customers at home. When is the help desk open? What do you do about support when it s not? CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #6 2
Out-of-scope Issues Advocate or refer? Advocate issue to another service provider. Refer customer to other service provider. Time-limited support. Offer to help for short fixed time period. If can t fix it within period, then customer is on their own. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #7 Out of Hours Coverage Pager rotation Voice mail forwards to pager. SAs rotate who carries pager each week. On-call responsibilities Is on-call SA responsible for fixing issues? Or does on-call SA contact specialists to fix? CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #8 Escalation Process First line support Handles 80+% of calls. May have time limit before escalation. May be working from a script. Second line support Subject matter experts. May sit with first line support periodically. Indicates a problem if too many calls received. Manager CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #9 3
Help Desk Software Functionality Create, update, and resolve requests. Sort and search requests. Generate request metrics. Knowledge base (customers, PCs, FAQs). Often called Request tracker Trouble ticket tracking system Issue tracking system CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #10 Why Help Desk Software? You have to track help requests. E-mail doesn t work How do you know someone has replied? How do you know what they said? How do you know two people haven t replied? What happens when you re out of town? CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #11 Ticket (a.k.a. Request) A report of a customer problem. Contains important data on problem: 1. Customer who s having the problem. 2. Problem description. 3. Problem classification. 4. Urgency and importance. 5. Notes added by SAs working on problem. 6. Status: resolved or not. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #12 4
Queues Tickets are organized into queues. Queues defined by help desk admin. Type of problem (net, email, web, print, etc.) Location Whatever classification makes sense Queue features Only specified SAs have access to a queue. Queues can auto-reply to certain questions. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #13 OTRS Open Ticket Request System Web Interfaces Agent (SA) Customer Public (Knowledge Base) E-mail Interface CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #14 Group admin faq stats users Description Groups Group for the users who should have admin rights in the system. After the system has been installed only the user "root@localhost" is in this group. Users in this group may create and change articles in the FAQ system. After the system has been installed no user is in this group. Users in this group may access the stats module of OTRS and generate statistics. After the system has been installed only "root@localhost" belongs to this group. This is the group where your agents should belong to and have read and write access. If users are in this group and have write rights they can use all functions of the ticket system. After the system has been installed this group is empty. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #15 5
Rights Right ro move into create owner priority rw Description Read-only access to tickets and queues of group. Right to move tickets between queues that belong to this group. Right to create tickets for group. Right to update owner of tickets in queues that belong to this group. Right to change the priority of tickets that belong to this group. Full read and write access to all tickets that belong to this group. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #16 Customer Users Customers can manage their requests too. Customers can also belong to groups to specify their access rights. Customer Management Can use external LDAP directory. Users cannot be deleted in OTRS, as they re used to track old requests. Users accounts can be marked invalid. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #17 Queues Default queues Raw: default location for incoming requests if you have no filter rules defined. Junk: queue for spam requests. Queues Create queues for each class of request. Assign most queues to users group. Queues cannot be deleted, only marked invalid. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #18 6
Workflow 1. Greeting 2. Problem Identification a. Classification b. Problem Statement c. Reproduction 3. Planning and Execution a. Solution Proposals b. Solution Selection c. Execution 4. Verification CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #19 Greeting Soliciting issues from customers. Greeters 1. Front line help desk support (phone, in person) 2. E-mail 3. Web 4. Network monitoring system How do customers find greeters? Signage. Employee orientation or classes. Internal web sites. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #20 Problem Identification Who classifies problem? First-line support. Customer (phone or web interface). Customer should be told of classification. Important that customer is involved in process. Ensures customer knows something is being done about the problem. Provides opportunity for customer feedback. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #21 7
Problem Statement Describes the problem in full detail. Usually responsibility of first-line support. Often requires more customer interaction. Help, I can t print! To which printer? From which machine? Using what application? CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #22 Reproducing the Problem If you can t reproduce it, you can t fix it. May require access to customer PC. Can be difficult over phone/email. Record method used to reproduce problem. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #23 Solution Selection Solutions vary in effectiveness and cost. Desk visits more expensive than e-mail. Temporary solution vs. permanent solution? Experienced customers may be useful participants in selecting a solution. Inexperienced customers will get scared. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #24 8
Execution Execution is often done by SA. Customer may have to execute solution. Remote customers and no remote ctl software. Dialog with customer has to be adjusted based on customer knowledge level. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #25 Verification Verify that the problem is solved. Use the same technique you used to reproduce the problem. Customer is final verification. Request should not be closed until customer verifies that the problem is fixed. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #26 Trend Analysis 1. Does a customer report the same issue repeatedly? 2. Are there many questions under a particular classification? 3. Are many customers reporting the same issue? 4. Are there any classes of requests that can become self-service? 5. Who are your most frequent customers? 6. What are your most frequent time-consuming requests? CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #27 9
References 1. Mark Burgess, Principles of System and Network Administration, Wiley, 2000. 2. Aeleen Frisch, Essential System Administration, 3 rd edition, O Reilly, 2002. 3. Thomas A. Limoncelli and Christine Hogan, The Practice of System and Network Administration, Addison-Wesley, 2002. 4. Evi Nemeth et al, UNIX System Administration Handbook, 3 rd edition, Prentice Hall, 2001. CIT 470: Advanced Network and System Administration Slide #28 10