Zammad: Intuitive Service Desk with connection to i-doit

Stronger together: With the service desk software Zammad and i-doit you combine your IT asset management with an intuitive ticket system. i-doit collects all the information about your IT infrastructure – Zammad organises all correspondence into tickets to help structure all internal and external processes. By connecting the two systems, employees can collaborate across all departments, use information from the CMDB and escalate processes to higher levels if necessary.

With a service desk or help desk, forwarding information is a thing of the past. All emails, phone notes, attachments and reports are combined into one ticket. If another employee is to take over this process, they are simply assigned to the ticket and thus have access to all process information. This significantly minimises training time, as the chronological sequence of correspondence is also listed in a structured manner.

Zammad distinguishes itself from other tools primarily through its clarity: a clear focus on a few core tasks instead of content overload. It guarantees the user a user- and task-centred view of their work and the customer in charge also finds their way around easily in their personalised online portal. The new development by former OTRS founder Martin Edenhofer relies on modern interfaces and a coherent operating concept right from the start, so that familiarisation is quick and uncomplicated.

Zammad offers its own API to connect various telephone systems or extension systems, for example. This records all incoming and outgoing calls and enables data exchange with other systems. In addition, users can authenticate themselves via external services such as Twitter, Google, LinkedIn & Co. A high level of security is achieved by configuring password policies, supported device logging and two-factor authentication.

In the same way, i-doit can also be seamlessly connected to Zammad. With the CMDB i-doit and the service desk software Zammad, you have systems that work perfectly together. Through the API connection, you can easily exchange information between i-doit and Zammad without having to do it manually. With just one click, you can go from the ticket directly to the i-doit object when you need specific information. 

But what does this coupling of i-doit and Zammad actually bring you in practice? The following use cases illustrate the most common advantages for you.

Through the integration of Zammad, you can create tickets in Zammad directly from i-doit. This makes annoying copy/paste actions a thing of the past and eliminates the tedious search. This not only saves you time, but also avoids transfer errors that can happen manually. All important information from the CMDB is entered directly into the ticket with just one click.

This can be information on the operating system, hardware or configurations, for example. But it can also be important contact persons, accounting data or further information on locations or organisations. In short: everything you have documented and created in i-doit.

If, for example, you find in one of your reports that a system needs to be updated, you can open the object from the report directly and create a new ticket. The information and affected objects are noted in this ticket. The ticket notifies the responsible administrator or department and thus initiates the further process.

By linking tickets and systems, all tickets are listed directly in the object. This way, not only can all tickets for a system be displayed, but recurring faults can also be quickly identified.

In combination with the i-doit logbook, this gives you a continuous life history of your documentation objects, as all changes to attributes and relations are recorded here. This is a great way to quickly identify systems that are prone to faults.

Processing tickets is tiresome, especially for support staff who have to constantly switch between different tools. Through the integration of Zammad with i-doit, all necessary information is already contained in the ticket. 

Thus, the employee neither has to switch to i-doit, nor to the console in order to find out, for example, on which patch level a server is. This linking of information, the status of objects and tickets turns the “I still need information” ping-pong between departments and people into a structured procedure to resolve faults in a goal-orientated manner. If you still need more detailed information, you can open the affected object with just one click.

Von dort gelangt man mit nur einem Klick ins Ticketsystem, um die Beschreibung und Dateianhänge zu öffnen oder auch zu ermitteln, wer den Change durchgeführt hat.

This streamlined process allows you to document all changes to devices and systems quickly and easily. If there are any disruptions, the ticket can be reopened to allow direct queries.

In many companies, a directory service such as Active Directory or openLDAP is used. New users are created, new groups are created and new policies are configured and rolled out. Unfortunately, often none of these changes are documented, even though they are crucial for secure operation. To document group policies, they could be saved as a report before and after editing.

We can now simply attach these reports to an email again and send the appropriate device in the subject, in this case our server [DC01].

If there should be any malfunctions in connection with this group policy in the future, the changes can be traced, and if necessary, reverted to the original state. With existing competences in the area of PowerShell scripting, you can even completely automate the documentation of such changes.

Imagine how nice would it be, if in the event of a system failure, a ticket with the system information was automatically created and sent to the responsible support staff to alert them? Sounds like a utopian idea? It is not! 

This is where another integration comes into play – the monitoring system, such as Nagios or Check_MK. In the event of a system failure, the status with the current logs is reported directly to Zammad, whereupon a ticket is automatically created and co-ordinated to the responsible offices. At the same time, the system status in i-doit, for example, is automatically changed from “In operation” to “Malfunction”.

For both the creation of backups and their restoration, Zammad offers two predefined scripts to keep the administration effort to a minimum. Via the command line (CLI), you can create cronjobs for these scripts to back up your instance regularly and automatically.