Crucial Data for IT Tickets

When you start designing a from scratch Ticketing system for your IT Department things a be a bit overwhelming. There are many programs out there that do the same thing but seem too busy, complex or just too expensive to implement.

Over the past year I have been working with contractors to deploy an in house ticketing system for our IT requests. For us third party options were too complex for a extremely small help desk to utilize, and ones that were free (i.e. Spiceworks) were too busy with unnecessary information for us. We went about creating the ticketing system however had little idea of what data we needed to capture in the system once it went live to users.

We started with the basics:

1. Issue
2. Due(Priority)
3. User
4. Category
5. Response Method

We found that users don't chose category's like we do so we hid that field for them and left the others. Due responses always defaulted to the slowest time (for us it was "within a week"), and the user field auto populated with the user who was logged into the web page. This could be changed but most users just wanted their name in there.

From their your case my differ, but its a good start to gathering data from your users via a ticketing system instead of phone calls and stop by's.

Meeting Industry Security Standards for Information Technology

Just remember that meeting industry standards for security in your IT Department is much like how the Titanic met shipping standards for life boats back in 1912.

Test Your IT Monitoring Tools Regularly

Most IT Departments have active monitoring tools to make sure you are notified in the event that something goes wrong, right, or is starting to look sketchy (much like a bad NHL trade). These systems are put in place with the mindset of a set it and forget it mentality because hey, its supposed to alert us right? Well if you haven't heard it before I am saying it now. No. Is that a complete sentence? Probably not, but it gets my point across. Monitoring systems and devices are only as good as their trustworthiness and much like your gradual trusting of friendships must grow by testing the tools on a regular basis.

I will use our power monitoring/temperature monitoring device in our server closet as an example. In the event of a power failure, or A/C unit failure one of two things will happen. In the first scenario, the unit alerts us by calling my cell phone to notify me that power has been lost and the unit is running on backup power (this unit is a cellular one). In scenario two the device calls my cell and alerts me to a high temperature reading, possibly caused by a malfunction in the A/C unit. If I never test the unit by pulling the power plug then I have no faith the unit will successfully call me in the event of a power outage, and if its not regularly tested then I have no faith the battery is still holding a charge inside the unit and will stay alive long enough to make the call needed through our vendor.

Testing these units regularly should be on your IT calendar and should be as often as you or a colleague can test it. (For us, quarterly should be our testing cycle).

Having faith in these systems to work correctly when needed can help an Administrator sleep at night knowing a trustful partner is always watching and thankfully never needs sleep.

New Bumper Sticker Idea

While laying in bed reading the doom and gloom of April's XP-mageddom I wanted to type out a warning to friends and family about running the ancient OS.

I came up with a saying that even impressed me after saying it

"For the love of IT, dump XP"

Didn't even realize is kinda rhymes. Now to just find some place to make the bumper sticker I'll never use.  I've got a dislike of those things unless they are in your cubicle somewhere.

Questions You Should Answer in a Project Proposal

Over the past year I have had to create more and more project proposals instead of just going crazy and buying things as I want to (Probably a good idea). As I have become hopefully better with each passing proposal I wanted to share a list of questions I try to answer in a project proposal helping me to better sell the project to management. I don't use them all, and each project results in the use of different questions and answers but this is a good place to start, maybe you will find your own questions as well when you create your own proposal.

1. Who will benefit from the project
2. Why are we doing this
3. What is our end goal
4. When could it be done
5. What are the steps of the project
6. What is the cost
7. What is the potential savings
8. What is wrong with the current system
9. Who will we purchase from
10. Why will we purchase from said vendors/people
11. Who will install this
12. Who is the project leader
13. What will it look like when its finished
14. What are the tasks of the project, and the timeline they will be finished in
15. What is the long term cost of the project
16. What is the goal of the project (Much like the question Why are we doing this)
17. How long will the end result last
18. Does it scale up easily

Laziness of Computer Repair Shops

After years of hard work and honestly I get the pleasure of looking over friends and family's computer to make sure they are in tip top shape when the owners believe otherwise.

This week I was approached by a friend and handed a machine that was a friend of a friends etc. They stated that the user took the machine to a repair shop and was told it was a mainboard issue, the user didn't want to spend the money and had asked around to see if anyone could take a second look. I responded to my friend with a "Sure ill be glad to" and was off to my work bench.

I worked on the toshiba laptop for 5 maybe 10 minutes doing basic testing and was able to conclude in that amount of time that the mainboard was fine, in fact the only fault part on the laptop was the hard drive. Bad hard drives can definitely cause a no POST situation and sure enough this was one of those times.

Then after my excitement of finding the issue started to wain I realized that the company that looked over this the first time was either lying or missed a basic part of computer troubleshooting. I really do not see how any company could stay in business after such a poor performance. Honesty and common sense should be a standard of any company, and small businesses are not omitted to that.

Rule of thumb, always get a second opinion from someone you can trust. Hopefully in the future that will be more businesses and less individuals.