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NETWAYS Blog

New Request Tracker Extensions: Search Result Highlights, Quick Assign & User Overview

We use Request Tracker on a daily basis, and have written many extensions for our own workflows and visualizations. Lately we’ve been helping a customer to migrate from OTRS to RT running in NWS, and learned about new ways to improve our workflows.

Highlight Search Results on Conditions

When you own a ticket, but someone else updated the ticket with a comment/reply, you want to immediately see this. Our extension makes this possible with either a background color or an additional icon (or both).
You can also limit this to replies/comments from customers, where the last update wasn’t performed by users in a specific group. This allows to immediately see support or sales tickets which need to be worked on in the dashboards.
Another use case is to highlight search result rows when a custom field matches a specified value. If you’re setting tickets for example, you can visually see the difference between a “bought ticket” and “paid ticket” state.
While developing the extension, I’ve also fixed an upstream RT bug which has been merged for future releases. There’s even more possibilities, as we’ve recognised that one of the BestPractical/RT developers forked our extension already 🙂

Quick Assign People to Tickets

By default, one needs to edit the “People” tab to assign a ticket to a privileged user, or modify adminCC and the requestor. This takes far too long and as such, our own NETWAYS extension improved this with drop-downs and action buttons. We have now open-sourced this feature set into a new extension on GitHub: rt-extension-quickassign.

 

Show Ticket Count per User and Status

This extension was released a while ago, and we’ve fixed a bug with empty sets in there. In addition to that, we’ve added a new configuration option which allows to list specific groups and their members, and not only privileged users. This comes in handy to only show the NETWAYS members but not any root or meta accounts. Read more on GitHub.

Do you need more customizations for Request Tracker, or want to run RT in a managed cloud environment? Just get in touch 🙂

OSMC Hackathon: Feature complete?

Our fourth OSMC hackathon started fully packed after an overwhelming conference – free form, and our introduction round provided many interesting topics to keep up with.
MQTT, OpenNMS, NSClient++, Elastic/Graylog, Migration from Nagios to Icinga 2, Zabbix, Prometheus, MySQL, ARM packages, Notification issues, Golang frameworks, Ansible, Puppet, Icinga Web 2 modules, Vsphere, Director, Maps, … holy moly, that’s super effective for just one day. Missed it? Join us next year!
Jens Schanz from Müller (Hint: The environment with 17k hosts and 200k services) mentioned a problem with missing notifications in his OSMC talk on Wednesday. So we did a deep dive in the production environment into one-time delayed notification without recovery for their ticket system integration. Turns out, that we’ve found a bug in Icinga, and also a quick workaround for production. Jens also knows how to use the debug console for future troubleshooting. Real #monitoringlove ❤️
Gian Arb from InfluxDB joined for the first hours, so “everyone who has questions, be quick”. Maybe he’ll stay longer next year, since he’s said that OSMC feels like home already. Rihards Olups shared Zabbix insights and focussed on improving MySQL monitoring. Our friends Tarus Balog and Ronny Trommer from OpenNMS looked into pushing sensor values into MQTT and OpenHAB, Tarus had his first success 🙂 Julien open-sourced an AMPQ adapter which forwards alerts from Prometheus.
Nicolai Buchwitz is building Icinga 2 for ARM hardware, and asked me to look into failing tests during the Debian package build. This turned out to be a very deep analysis with memory access violations and specific gcc and libstdc++ versions on this hardware, x86 works just fine. 50% are solved, more investigation needed.
Michael Medin implemented a huge new feature: Native Powershell support in NSClient++.  Cannot wait to see this being released! Dave Kempe started working on translation for the famous Icinga 2 book, together with Thomas Mr. Icinga Book. Or as they say: “Translating Austrian to Australian (English) …” 😉 Thilo jumped right into Jinja templates for the Icinga Ansible modules, and also offered help on enhancing the graph integration in mail notifications.
Noah and Jean played with the Gin library in Golang, providing an HTTP framework. They also discussed the state logic in Icinga 2 together with Eric and our friends from Syseleven, Max and Maurice. Max also did a deep-dive into new enhancements for Icinga Web 2 with more advanced scheduled downtime options. Together with Eric, he found a bug in the forms too. First time hackathon attendees discovered how to write Icinga Web 2 with the help from Eric.
The Map module for Icinga Web 2 received a docs patch from Jens, while Thomas Mr. Director looked into improvements for the business process module, Director, Cube (PR from Nicolai) and certainly the newly released Vsphere module. Last but not least, Flo was for the rescue and helped Jens to modify his Batman theme for Icinga Web 2. Dave also shared the color blind theme for Icinga Web 2 with Jennifer, and to mention too, Jean helped Jens with a DNS/network problem on Icinga startup.
It is INCREDIBLE what we achieved together as OSMC hacking family. We are never feature complete, always exploring and developing new things. See you next year, mark November 4th–7th, 2019 in your calendar!

DEV Retreat 2018 Recap

We had a lovely time somewhere in the “Franconian Alps”, away from daily development business. Our dev retreat always includes one day of “looking back, looking forward”, the second day is reserved for fun stuff.
After a relaxed breakfast on Friday, Marius invited us into the icebreaker game. Rock-Paper-Scissors combined with catching the other team on win, really a challenge and discussions on failure afterwards. Before diving into a strategic outlook with Icinga and NETWAYS development, Flo made a shout-out for the first round of beer pong. Another group was like “hey, what’s cards against humanity with monitoring?” and just started playing, that was pure fun 🙂
Later on, we did a full retrospective of the past year in our development team. Everyone shared their current mood, with then collecting three important topics (good or bad) from the past year. This entire timeline with many milestones was put in contrast with everyone’s mood over time. Reflecting the not-so-good tasks towards the “we really love this project and technology” we created our own team “graph”.
Having shared this many feelings and milestones, we made it into another round – direct feedback on everyone’s important points, be it good or bad. We’ve then built a topic cloud from these and voted topics we would like to discuss and define solutions. The two of them were selected and we started to discuss, help each other, criticise specific points and agree on a solution together. Pure energy, and not even the BBQ being ready could have stopped us. Knowledge transfer, trainee practice, more direct feedback, interesting technologies and new projects coming up …
After all we enjoyed a lovely evening and night sitting by the campfire, playing another round of beer pong, chatting and enjoying life.
The next day our plan was to escape a room. 60 minutes, lots of puzzles and hints, to finally solve everything. It is hard to describe as everyone finds his/her role pushing the others to the next level and puzzle. And there’s discussion and “anger” afterwards that you’ve lost 20 minutes on such a stupid question … but you failed together, and that’s a good feeling even 🙂
Next to getting to know colleagues and new trainees better, my personal highlights this year are these two quotes:

During our debugging sessions, I never had that feeling that I am treated as a “dumb” trainee. My ideas and knowledge are taken into account, and I really like this in our team.

Your mission as Senior Developer or experienced developer is to share your knowledge and experience with your colleagues. Help them improve and learn from you, with the most detailed feedback you can give.

And on we go, we have to develop projects like Icinga DB, Reporting, NoMa, Mobile, support daily business with Icinga 2, Icinga Web 2, Icinga Exchange, Request Tracker, Pretix, Discourse, GitLab, Jenkins and so much more filling the timeline for next year’s dev retreat already 🙂

GitLab training v2.3.0 released

We really had an awesome time in the last 2 days practicing Git and GitLab. With all those ideas from a training, I’ve updated the material and tagged v2.3.0.
This release includes bugfixes for “hard to understand” slides and continues with new features added to the training, done “on the fly” yesterday: Issue boards, Web IDE with commits & CI pipeline jobs, improved workflows with milestone, issue and merge request handling and much more.
Cannot wait to practice this? Get your ticket for our GitLab training soon enough! 🙂

A peek into GitLab 11, the Web IDE and Auto DevOps with Kubernetes

GitLab 11 was just released last week and introduces a bunch of new features. I’ve picked the most exciting ones for a short peek as our hosted production environment was already upgraded by Stefan 🙂
 

Web IDE

You can already add and edit files directly in your browser. Dirk mentioned this in his blog post, it motivates open source contributors to enhance the documentation. For larger changes we are used to fire up an IDE like Visual Studio, JetBrains Goland, PHPStorm, Atom, Eclipse, etc.
Sometimes you don’t need a full blown IDE, or you don’t have access to on your mobile device. It would be nice to have immediate results from build, compile and test stages, best in an isolated (container) environment.
The newly introduced GitLab Web IDE attempts to become a new player in the field. On the right you can already see the current pipeline job status from the latest commit. Once we’ve edited the file, we can commit (and push at once) and the CI will trigger a new job run. Just awesome!

In its current implementation, the IDE is accessible from files view only, but the roadmap proves that there’s more to come on project creation. Just type t in the main project view and search for a specific file. Then pick Web IDE from the upper left bullets and rock on. There is syntax highlighting and code auto-completion included ❤️


 
 

Auto DevOps with Kubernetes

Our vision is to replace disparate DevOps toolchains with a single integrated application that is pre-configured to work by default across the complete DevOps lifecycle.

Auto DevOps enables your CI/CD workflow to advance even further with pipeline container environments built on Kubernetes. GitLab provides its own Kubernetes integration, accompanied with default templates for projects and build pipelines. This isn’t limited to build, test, deploy stages but also includes a variety of additional stages:

  • Build and Test
  • Code Quality checks
  • Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), Dependency and container scanning for vulnerabilities
  • Review Apps, deploy current state to temporary application environment in Kubernetes (optional)
  • Deploy to Kubernetes production environment (optional)
  • Monitoring for fetching deployment metrics from the Kubernetes cluster via Prometheus exporter (optional)


 
You can see the changes inside the menu where Operations was introduced and provides settings for environments and Kubernetes integration. This was previously found in the CI/CD section. A Kubernetes cluster can be assigned to a specific project, you can safely play and test without harming a global environment.
Nicole and Gabriel shared more insights into GitLab 11 features in their OSDC talk on “Git things done with GitLab!”. Check the archive for a live demo especially on the Auto DevOps feature, first time I fully understood its purpose 🙂
 

Notable Changes

In terms of roles, GitLab renamed “Master” to “Maintainer”.

GitLab also decided to release the “Squash and Merge” option into the Open source edition. This feature allows you to develop a merge request in multiple commits, and upon merge back to master, it will automatically squash the commits into a single one. Want to learn more about git squash? We’ve got you covered in our GitLab training 🙂


I really hope that GitLab will also open-source Merge request approvals in future releases. This is something which we use for code review and release managed on GitHub on a daily basis and would enhance our GitLab flow too.
Still not enough? I’d love to talk GitLab with you in our upcoming training sessions, including the best development workflows from our daily work 🙂