Using RT in a large organization (thousands of users)

RT Users
1

Hi,
In the BestPractical web site, RT is described as “RT is a ticketing system
for small- to medium-sized organizations”.

I’m working on a helpdesk ticketing / workflow solution for a large
organization - thousands of users, some of them are technical, most of them
are your average PC user (not IT people).

Using a home-grown system today, which needs to die (not scaleable, horrible
usability, etc).

There will be a team of people handling the tickets, dispatching engineering
change requests, etc.

My questions are:

  1. What are the main limitations of RT (features / functionality) that make
    it unfit for large organizations? (don’t want to hit a brick wall in a few
    weeks).

  2. Can some people share their experience in large organizations of this
    scale? (what worked, was there custom development required, etc).

  3. Am I better off looking at a commercial system like Remedy / Peregrine
    (for our organization size), due to potential cost of custom development
    integrating RT?

Thanks,
Pete Dole

2

Hi,
In the BestPractical web site, RT is described as “RT is a ticketing
system for small- to medium-sized organizations”.

That’s our small-companiness showing. The problem is really that we
don’t spend much, if any time on the marketing side of things. This is
probably obvious by the state of the corporate website. That prose
dates from…sometime around 2002 or so, when RT really wasn’t in use in
a whole lot of high-volume applications.

At the time, I would have blanched if you’d said you wanted to deploy
RT somewhere handling 1000 tickets a day. These days, I know of
organizations pushing 10,000 tickets through RT on a slow day, bursting
to over 20,000 when things get busy.

  1. Am I better off looking at a commercial system like Remedy / Peregrine
    (for our organization size), due to potential cost of custom development
    integrating RT?

You should know that I’m biased, but I certainly don’t think so. RT is
robust and scalable and there’s an excellent community here and on
rt-devel…And of course, we at Best Practical can provide the sort of
commercial support you’d expect for a mission critical application.

Best,
Jesse

3

At the time, I would have blanched if you’d said you wanted to deploy
RT somewhere handling 1000 tickets a day. These days, I know of
organizations pushing 10,000 tickets through RT on a slow day, bursting
to over 20,000 when things get busy.

  1. Am I better off looking at a commercial system like Remedy / Peregrine
    (for our organization size), due to potential cost of custom development
    integrating RT?

We’re a relatively small org, but have done a fair bit of customization to RT
since we’re using it as a CRM. Out of the box RT covered all of the basics,
and the wiki + extensions didn’t hurt. We’ve put in about 100 man hours to
do some serious customizations since (many now public) since we rolled
out RT 8 months ago. I don’t expect that would be much less with anything
else; users don’t want to learn anything anyhow, so you’ve always got to try
to warp things to their whims :wink: Except that in those cases half the time
you’d discover what you wanted to do couldn’t be done, whereas in RT you
start to get a better grasp of how everything’s glued together. Also, if you
can make use of the built-in self-service interface, rather than
rolling your own,
that should make things much easier to adopt.

Just a few moments rambling thoughts on the matter,

Cheers!
Cambridge Energy Alliance: Save money. Save the planet.

4

Peter,

I might also add that we are now planning a project to convert our

Remedy tickets to RT and move the help desk over. We have RT 3.6.4, not
nearly as robust as 3.8.2, and there are just too many flexible options
for reporting with Custom Fields to NOT use RT.

Kenn
LBNLOn 3/24/2009 10:10 AM, Jesse Vincent wrote:

On Tue 24.Mar’09 at 10:16:27 +0200, Peter Dole wrote:

Hi,
In the BestPractical web site, RT is described as “RT is a ticketing
system for small- to medium-sized organizations”.

That’s our small-companiness showing. The problem is really that we
don’t spend much, if any time on the marketing side of things. This is
probably obvious by the state of the corporate website. That prose
dates from…sometime around 2002 or so, when RT really wasn’t in use in
a whole lot of high-volume applications.

At the time, I would have blanched if you’d said you wanted to deploy
RT somewhere handling 1000 tickets a day. These days, I know of
organizations pushing 10,000 tickets through RT on a slow day, bursting
to over 20,000 when things get busy.

  1. Am I better off looking at a commercial system like Remedy / Peregrine
    (for our organization size), due to potential cost of custom development
    integrating RT?

You should know that I’m biased, but I certainly don’t think so. RT is
robust and scalable and there’s an excellent community here and on
rt-devel…And of course, we at Best Practical can provide the sort of
commercial support you’d expect for a mission critical application.

Best,
Jesse

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5

Hi,
In the BestPractical web site, RT is described as “RT is a ticketing
system
for small- to medium-sized organizations”.

I’m working on a helpdesk ticketing / workflow solution for a large
organization - thousands of users, some of them are technical, most
of them
are your average PC user (not IT people).

We use RT not just for our internal support (which is about 1000
users, many of whom are not IT literate) but also for answering
questions submitted through our website. Currently there are just
over 10,000 users registered on the system. We don’t process that
many tickets though; a couple of hundred a day is typical. It
handles this load trivially; I haven’t had to make any of the
performance improving tricks like running the database and web front
end on separate machines, yet.

Tim

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