Ticketing Systems
Introduction
A help desk system is a way to organize different tasks into "tickets". If you're new to IT, you might not know why it's called a ticket. Back in the early days, if you had an issue and needed support, you'd write your request down on a slip of paper. Someone at the help desk would take this slip and put it into a queue for the techs. That slip of paper was a ticket and the terminology has stuck around into modern times.
If you have not worked in IT or worked in a small organization, you might not have used a ticket system before. Having one in your home lab is a great way to get practice with ticketing systems. You can log issues with your homelab, fix them, and then document them. If you feel real adventurous, make your family submit tickets to fix their tech ;)
Costs
Some ticketing systems are designed for enterprise use and can be very expensive. Others are free, free & open source, or low cost.
Use Cases
The use cases for this type of technology are blah blah
Solutions
| Vendor/Link | Cost/License | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Spiceworks | FREE / Proprietary | Available in cloud only. Old version of on-prem is insecure and no longer developed. |
| osTicket | FREE / GNU/GPL | Self-hosted, PHP/MySQL, if you know or learn PHP it's easy to customize. Has AD/LDAP plugin for authentication. |
| ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus | Free/Paid / Proprietary | Standard version is free for up to 5 techs. Installs as a free trial of Enterprise |
| SupportPal | $249.95 annual / Proprietart | Self-hosted, PHP/MySQL. Source code is encoded with Ioncube. Extending this system requires use of the API. |