Documentation – Helpdesk

Internal: Service information

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Identity card

Property	Value
Name	Helpdesk
Description	Central helpdesk providing a single interface to EGI support
URL	https://helpdesk.egi.eu
Support Email	support at ggus.eu
Helpdesk Support Unit	EGI Services and Service Components I__ Helpdesk (GGUS)
Configuration Database entry	https://goc.egi.eu/portal/index.php?Page_Type=Site&id=247
Supplier	KIT
Roadmap	N/A
Release notes	https://confluence.egi.eu/display/EGIHLPDSK/Update+Notes
Source code	Not available
Issue tracker for developers	https://confluence.egi.eu/display/EGIHLPDSK/To-Do
License	Zammad
Privacy Policy	https://helpdesk.ggus.eu/legals/privacy-policy.html

Internal: Access and roles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Access the EGI Helpdesk service

Users can access the EGI Helpdesk service GGUS with an existing EGI Check-in account.

When you access the service for the first time, you are automatically assigned a role with minimal privileges (“user”) by default: in such a situation you can only create user tickets and can’t access tickets created by other users.

In order to create your first ticket, please use the green “+” button in the lower left part of your screen.

Access to the previous EGI Helpdesk

The previous EGI Helpdesk is still available in read-only mode for historical reasons: users can access to the tickets that were closed before the migration to the new helpdesk. Either an X509 personal certificate or a federated identity are required for the access.

Roles management

Roles in GGUS define the permissions and capabilities each user has when interacting with tickets. Proper role assignment ensures that users have access to the appropriate tools and information they need for their specific tasks.

Note: Currently the roles are managed within GGUS; we are planning to move the roles management to EGI Check-in.

If users require a role with greater privileges than the default role, they should create a service request ticket for the TPM group, who will forward the ticket to the appropriate second-level group. Users who have advanced privileges already can submit their service requests regarding the helpdesk portal directly to “Second Level › Services › EGI Services and Service Components › Helpdesk (GGUS)” (start typing “ggus” in the group field for quick access).

How to check your roles

You can check your assigned role by following these steps (not available for users with the default role):

Click on your User Logo in the lower left corner of the screen.
Navigate to Profile and select Roles.

Role Hierarchy and Capabilities

Standard Roles

User
- Default role assigned upon registration.
- Permissions:
  - Basic ticket submission interface (only group and site fields are available).
  - Ticket submission only to TPM and NGIs.
  - Visibility of only your own tickets.
GGUS User
- Users who need read-only access to others’ tickets, but with limited editing rights.
- Permissions:
  - Enhanced ticket submission interface (category, ticket area, priority, affected vo, notified groups).
  - Ticket submission to TPM, NGIs, Second Level and Other Infrastructures.
  - Read-only access to all tickets.
  - (in development) Limited access to personal information such as names and email addresses.
Common
- Supporters who manage and update tickets throughout the system.
- Permissions:
  - Full read and write access to all tickets.

Roles with Specific Capabilities

These roles provide additional capabilities beyond the standard roles and are assigned based on specific needs. The prerequisite for obtaining any of these roles is having at least the Common role, which is usually sufficient for most users.

GGUS Expert
- Advanced supporters who can submit tickets to the Third Level and Product Teams.
VO
- Indicator of Membership in the Virtual Organization (VO).
- Enables VO specific features such as overviews and ticket areas.
VO_team
- Permissions:
  - Ability to submit Team tickets on behalf of a VO.
- Use Case: Users representing teams and submitting team-related tickets.
TPM (Ticket Process Manager)
- Permissions:
  - Additional section in the Overview showing tickets submitted to the TPM.
- Use Case: Users who are involved in the First Level Support activity.
Alarm
- Permissions:
  - Ability to create Alarm tickets.
- Use Case: Users who need to notify WLCG Tier-0 and Tier-1 administrators about serious problems of the site at any time, independent from usual office hours.
Multisites
- Permissions:
  - Ability to create tickets to many sites in one go.
- Use Case: EGI and WLCG Operations to conduct middleware related campaigns.
Mini-Admins
- Permissions:
  - Ability to grant particular roles, e.g. VO role to other users
- Use Case: Management of VO users in the helpdesk

Contact

If you have any issues with roles or general questions regarding the EGI helpdesk, please submit a ticket to the group “Second Level › Services › EGI Services and Service Components › Helpdesk (GGUS)” (start typing “ggus” in the group field for quick access), or, if this group is not available to you, submit a ticket to the TPM.

Internal: Helpdesk features

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The pages of this section detail multiple features of the EGI Helpdesk.

Internal: User guide

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

GGUS is the Helpdesk service of the EGI Infrastructure. Incident and Service request tickets can be recorded, and their progress is tracked until the solution. The users of the service should not need to know any of the details of what happens to the ticket in order to get it from creation to solution. However, an understanding of the operation of the system may be helpful to explaining what happens when you request help.

Tickets can be created through the GGUS web interface, whose access is described in the page Access and roles

Once the ticket has been created in GGUS, it is processed by supporters and assigned to the appropriate group to deal with the issue. The groups are generally addressed via mailing lists, so when a ticket is assigned to a support group, an email message is sent to people included to the associated list.

Submitting a ticket using the web interface

To submit a ticket through GGUS you first need to login through EGI Check-in, as explained in the page Access and roles.

After login, you are prompted to the dashboard page:

In the lower left corner, you can find a “+” button:

Click on it and select “New ticket”: you will be prompted to the ticket submit form.

The ticket submit form on web interface

The tickets submit form offers a set of fields which should help you to describe the issue you want to record as detailed as possible. Most of the fields on the submit form are optional.

“TITLE” is a mandatory field. It should give a short description of the issue.
“CUSTOMER”: name and email address of the user creating the ticket
“TEXT”: here you can add a detailed description of the issue.
“CATEGORY” (mandatory) provides a drop-down list with possible values, like Incidents and Service Request. Choose the appropriate value according to the issue you are going to record.
“GROUP”: provides a drop-down list of all the support groups enabled in GGUS, which are grouped by category: click on the green arrow besides the name of each category to see eventual sub-categories and finally the support groups. If you already know the name of the support group, you can start to type it in the field to display it and then to select it. If you don’t know whom to address your ticket, you can leave this field unselected, and the ticket will be automatically assigned to TPM, the EGI First Level support who will process your ticket and assign it to the most appropriate support group.

“SITE” provides a drop-down list with all the EGI sites registered in GOCDB and OSG sites registered in OIM DB. When selecting a site from the list, the appropriate NGI/ROC is set automatically, and they will be both notified about this ticket by email once created.
“TICKET AREA” provides a drop-down list with possible values. This field is for categorizing the issue. It defaults to “Other”. Check “Issue type values” page .
“PRIORITY” (mandatory) provides a drop-down list with possible priority values. They are “less urgent” (which is the default), “urgent”, and “very urgent”. See the page Ticket priority
“AFFECTED VO” provides a drop-down list of all VOs supported by GGUS.
“TIME OF ISSUE” defaults to the submitting time.
“NOTIFIED GROUPS”: with this field you can select other support groups that might be interested in following the progress of your ticket.
“NOTIFIED USERS”: you can involve other people in the ticket by adding their email address into this field.
“NOTIFICATION MODE” defaults to “on every change”. The Notification mode manages the update notifications the user receives. If “On solution” is selected, then you only get notified when the ticket status is set to “solved”.

After clicking the “Create” button you get a confirmation page showing the information submitted and the ticket ID.

Ticket categories

The ticket category is for differentiating between incidents and service requests. This distinction is helpful for supporters as well as for the GGUS reporting, e.g. for excluding test tickets. Other categories were added over the time. Currently the following values are available for selection:

Incident (see the FitSM definition).
Service request (see the FitSM definition).
- See the list of service requests for the internal and for the external services of the EGI portfolio.
Documentation (used to request creation and update on documentation).
Release (used when a new version of the EGI Core Services is ready to be tested; see the Change, Release, and Deployment Management procedures)
CMS Internal (for cms VO specific tickets)
EGI Coordination/Planning (to track activities not falling into the service request definition)
WLCG Coordination/Planning (to track activities not falling into the service request definition)
Test

Special tickets

Users with special roles can submit special kind of tickets, such as:

Tickets overview

After the login, you land to the dashboard page as explained above. If you click on “Overviews” in the menu on the left you will have an overview of the tickets created in the helpdesk. Several views are available: in each view you can further filter the list of tickets by GROUP, STATUS, and PRIORITY; besides, depending on the roles you own, in the displayed lists you will see only the tickets you are allowed to access.

“My Tickets”: here you have the list of tickets that you created.
“My Subscribed Tickets”: the list of tickets you subscribed to.
“My Assigned Tickets Open”: the list of tickets specifically assigned to you in any of the open statuses.
“My Assigned Tickets All”: the list of tickets specifically assigned to you in any status.
“Tickets Open”: all the tickets in any open status
“Tickets All”: all the tickets, also the ones that were closed.
“Alarm Tickets”: the list of Alarm tickets.
“Site Tickets Open”: the list of tickets in any of the open statuses where a site is involved.
“EGI Services Tickets Open”: the list of tickets in any of the open statuses assigned to the GROUPS within the ticket category “EGI Services and Service Components”
“VO Support Tickets Open”: the list of tickets in any of the open statuses assigned to the GROUPS within the ticket category “VO Support”
“Second Level Tickets Open”: the list of tickets in any of the open statuses assigned to the GROUPS within the ticket categories “LifeScience Services”, “Networking”, “Other Middleware”, “PITHIA Community”, and “WLCG”.
“Other Infrastructures Tickets Open”: the list of tickets in any of the open statuses assigned to the OSG related groups.
“Other Projects Tickets Open”: the list of tickets in any of the open statuses assigned to the GROUPS representing the several middleware products (3rd level support).

Modifying tickets

The easiest way to modify a ticket is to add a response by replying to the email notification you get when a ticket is modified by someone else: to do this in the correct way, please pay attention on not to change the subject line of the email message you received.

The other way is to use the web interface, which allows you to modify also other aspects of a ticket. When you display a ticket in your web browser, if you scroll down at the bottom of the page you can find a text box to add your reply to the ticket.

You also have the opportunity to attach files along with your text reply, in a similar way as explained in the previous section. When you have completed your reply, click on the “Update” button in the bottom right corner of the screen to add your response to the ticket.

If you have a supporter role and you want to share your reply only with the other supporters following up the ticket, you can click on the lock icon on the left side of the text box to keep your comment as “internal”: in this way, the ticket submitter will not receive any notification related to your reply.

In addition to the reply to the ticket, you can also modify the other fields associated to it (if you the required permissions associated to the role owned in the system). Besides the fields that were mentioned in the previous sections, you can now see also:

“Owner”: (Only if you have a at least supporter role) The given support group can appoint one of their members to directly follow-up the ticket.
“TAGS”: you can tag your ticket with a word (useful for example if you want to associate tickets per topic without directly linking them, but that topic is not included in the “TICKET AREA” field).
“LINKS”: you can link your ticket to another one, using in case the PARENT/CHILD relation.
“RELATED ANSWERS”: you can link a page from the Knowledge page if related to the topic discussed in the ticket.
Subscribe button: if you have the rights to see a ticket and you are interested in follow its progress, you can subscribe to it: at any update of the ticket you will get an email notification.

Ticket state

Setting the right ticket state is important to say the users if for example the ticket has been acknowledged by someone or if some feedback from the submitter is required to progress with the processing of a given ticket. Here is a description of the different state values and how they should be used.

assigned: this status is set automatically and can’t be selected in the drop-down list menu. After a ticket is assigned to a support group, this group is notified via email about the ticket assignment.
in progress: support staff who work on the ticket should change status to “in progress” when they acknowledge it. This is necessary to announce that someone is taking care of the ticket and is working on it.
waiting for submitter’s reply: this status value should be set ONLY by the supporters and ONLY when asking the SUBMITTER for further information.
on hold: this status should be used in those situations where a solution cannot be provided in short times but is planned for a certain point in the future because depending for example on the release of a software fix or on other related activities that require more time to be completed.
solved: this state is used to close a ticket when a solution is provided. Adding a full explanation of the solution is recommended and will be helpful when the given ticket is used as a reference and to create documentation from it.
unsolved: This status is for tickets that can not be solved due to any reason (ticket duplicated, topic not valid any longer, won’t fix, etc.). Please add a comment in the text field explaining why it can’t be solved.
closed: This state is automatically applied to tickets in the “solved” and “unsolved” states 4 weeks after the last update. Tickets in the “closed” state cannot be reopened or edited. Any updates submitted via email to a “closed” ticket will be rejected.
verified: This state allows ticket submitters to confirm that they are satisfied with the provided solution. The “verified” state is available only for tickets currently in the “solved” and “unsolved” states. Once a ticket is “verified”, it cannot be reopened or edited. Any updates submitted via email to a “verified” ticket will be rejected.

Ticket history

If you click on the word “Ticket” displayed in top-right corner of the page, you can access the ticket history. It shows all relevant changes of the ticket in chronological order. Changes of these fields lead to a new entry in ticket history:

Category
Group
Owner
Ticket Area
State
Priority
Affected VO
Time of Issue
Notified Groups
Notified Users
Notification Mode
TAGS
LINKS
Related Answers
Notifications (subscriptions)

Ticket Participation

As described in the previous sections, GGUS system offers various possibilities for involving additional people in the tickets. In summary, there are three ways:

involve other support groups in the progress of a ticket (“Notified groups” field).
Involve individual people in the progress of a ticket by specifically adding their email address in the “NOTIFIED USERS” field.
Subscribe yourself to a ticket.

Internal: Workflows

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Description of some of the Helpdesk workflows.