Scribd
Upload
160 views

Campus Networking Best Practices: This Presentation and Related Materials Will Be Available at

This document provides best practices and guidance for setting up a help desk service. It discusses determining the scope of support, ensuring tools and processes are scalable, planning infrastructure and traffic flows, acquiring necessary resources which are often limited, establishing policies to protect staff, and creating ticketing and documentation systems. It emphasizes training staff and customers, proactively addressing issues, and using ticketing software like RT and Trac to effectively track issues and communications.

Uploaded by

jlarosab
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
160 views

Campus Networking Best Practices: This Presentation and Related Materials Will Be Available at

This document provides best practices and guidance for setting up a help desk service. It discusses determining the scope of support, ensuring tools and processes are scalable, planning infrastructure and traffic flows, acquiring necessary resources which are often limited, establishing policies to protect staff, and creating ticketing and documentation systems. It emphasizes training staff and customers, proactively addressing issues, and using ticketing software like RT and Trac to effectively track issues and communications.

Uploaded by

jlarosab
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 19

Help Desk Services

Campus Networking Best


Practices
This Presentation and related materials will be
available at:
http://nsrc.org/tutorials/2008/sanog12/
Getting Started

What are some of the first questions to


answer?
 Are you going to offer support?

 What if you don’t?

 Is that an option?

 What do you want to or need to support?


Scalability

 Do your tools scale? If not, design them


so they will.
 Be flexible
 Do What’s easier but, don't do...
 Quick “fixes” = Big overhead later
Starting from Scratch


Plan

Design and optimize traffic flow

Use available tools

Ticketing systems

Wikis/Document management

The Web - Use it!

Some typical scenarios

Be ready for spikes – graceful failure
mode.
Resources

 You’ll probably need more than you can


get.
 Where will you get these resources?
 What are resources?
 Money, space, staffing, talent, administrative
support, phones, networks, hardware,
software, classes, etc.
 Become efficient and prioritize.
Protecting Your Group


Set hours
 Backup your consultants
 Write down your policies
 Second line of defense
 Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs)
 Issues you can’t resolve... How do you
deal with failure?
Creating Your Help Desk

 Remove roadblocks!!

Getting talent - What’s the draw?
 The logistics
 Customized installs
 Make software available
 Document
Creating Your Help Desk Cont.

 Use the Web


 Use Email and tickets

trac: http://trac.edgewall.org/

rt: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

Auto-response? (email, tickets)

Searchable index (Mhonarc) vs. Mailman
Creating Your Help Desk Cont.

 Phone Systems

Hold queue - yes!

Can users leave voice mail?
 Depends on your support
 Very high overhead

Phone trees - Good and bad (escape?)

Phone traffic flow (Reception, hardware,
network group, consulting, etc.)
Creating Your Help Desk Cont.


Using other tools

Live chat

Wikis

Blogs

Scheduling and scheduling software.

Scheduling is “n” complex to do
Proactive Steps
 Train your clients
 Offer free or fee-based training
 Push your documentation on your users.
 Push your Website
 Train your staff and train them some more
 Assign staff projects
 Stay up-to-date with what you support
Ticketing Systems
From yesterday:
rt

Heavily used worldwide.

Can be customized to your location.

Somewhat difficult to install and configure.

Handles large-scale operations.
trac

A hybrid system that includes a wiki and project
management features.

Ticketing system not as robust as rt, but works well.

Often used for ”trac”king group projects.
Ticketing Systems - 2

Why are they important?

Track all events, failures and issues

Focal point for help desk communication

Use it to track all communications

Both internal and external

Events originating from the outside:

customer complaints

Events originating from the inside:

System outages (direct or indirect)

Planned maintenance / upgrade:
Remember to notify your customers!
Ticketing Systems – 3
 Use ticket system to follow each case,
including internal communication between
technicians

Each case is assigned a case number

Each case goes through a similar life cycle:

New

Open

...

Resolved

Closed
Help Request Flow

A sample top-level view of flow of a help request

 Ticket System Helpdesk Tech Eqpt


----------------------------------------------------------------
T T T T
query | | | |
from ---->| | | |
customer |--- request --->| | |
<- ack. -- | | | |
| |<-- comm --> | |
| | |- fix issue -> eqpt
| |<- report fix -| |
customer <-|<-- respond ----| | |
| | | |
Sample trac Projects
An open project:
http://ws.edu.isoc.org/trac/afnog08/
Closed projects:
http://nsrc.org/trac/afnog09/
http://nsrc.org/trac/pacnog/
Fully available live demo:
http://www.hosted-projects.com/trac/TracDemo/Demo
Installation Cookbook (Ubuntu):
http://nsrc.org/tutorials/2008/sanog12/day2/trac/
Sample rt system

Live demo:
http://rt3.fsck.com/
Sample screenshots:
http://blog.bestpractical.com/2008/07/today-were-rele.html
Summary

 Quick fixes hurt


 You may be short on resources
 Set expectations
 Remove roadblocks
– Calculate expense with, without and to
remove.
 Lots of staff training.
 Use software to your advantage (rt/trac)
 Is the customer always right?
Questions?

You might also like