Request Tracker 6.0.0 Beta Now Available

The countdown to RT 6 is officially on, and we’re thrilled to invite you to get in early! The beta release of Request Tracker 6.0.0 is now available - and this is your chance to explore what’s new, and get a head start on everything it has to offer.

RT 6 is a significant upgrade featuring:

• Modern browser interactions powered by htmx

• An updated HTML message editor for faster, smoother message composition

• A refreshed, more user-friendly interface built with Bootstrap 5

• And a host of behind-the scenes enhancements designed to make your daily workflows faster, simpler, and more powerful

Want a sneak peek before diving in? Check out our latest blog posts:

• Developer Preview: Request Tracker 6

• RT 6 Beta Coming Soon: New Features Preview

This beta release is your opportunity to preview what's coming and help us polish the final release. If you're interested in testing it out or want to dig into the details, head over to our forum announcement for full information on how to get started. Just want to take RT 6 for a test drive? Try it out on our demo instance.

Your feedback makes RT better. We can’t wait to hear what you think!

RT 6 Beta Coming Soon: New Features Preview

Exciting news for the Request Tracker (RT) community—RT 6 is coming soon, and we’re getting closer to the public beta release! As we reported on the forum, we’ve been running RT 6 on our own RT instance, and it’s made updating tickets fun as we work with the new features! While we finalize the last details, we want to share a sneak peek of some of the new features you can expect in this major update.

Upgraded CKEditor 5

One of the most noticeable improvements in RT 6 is the upgraded CKEditor 5, which brings a modern, streamlined editing experience. Whether you’re formatting ticket responses or drafting internal notes, CKEditor 5 enhances usability with a cleaner interface, better support for rich text, and improved handling of copy-pasted content, including images.

RT 6 running with CKEditor 5

New "Description" Field for Tickets

To provide even more context within RT, we’ve added a new "Description" field on tickets. This allows users to store additional details beyond the subject and initial content, making it easier to provide structured, at-a-glance information about a ticket. Whether you need to summarize an issue, add key details, or categorize requests more effectively, this field will help improve organization and clarity.

RT 6 with Ticket Descriptions

Enhanced Auto-Refresh for Saved Searches

We know how valuable saved searches are, especially for keeping an eye on ticket activity. RT 6 introduces an improved auto-refresh feature, ensuring your saved searches update more efficiently. This means faster access to the latest ticket information, helping teams stay on top of workflows with minimal manual effort.

Auto-refresh options in RT 6

Public Beta Coming Soon

We’re excited to get RT 6 into your hands, and the public beta will be available soon. If you want to be among the first to test it and provide feedback, stay tuned for our official beta announcement.

Want an early look at RT 6 in action? You can sign up for a quick demo session and see what’s new.

In the meantime, let us know what you think of these new features in the comments or on our forum!

Stay tuned for more updates as we approach the RT 6 release!

Manage your Splunk Alerts and Event in Request Tracker

If you run Splunk for observability, you can easily integrate with Request Tracker (RT) or RTIR with the RT connector app available right in Splunkbase. This integration is designed to automatically create new tickets from alerts, allowing you to effectively assign and manage incidents, ensuring that your team is always on top of issues as they arise.

Splunk Enterprise Security is a comprehensive security solution often used to automate monitoring of machine-generated data produced throughout an organization. It acts as a robust log aggregator, detecting security threats in real-time. By centralizing logs from across your IT infrastructure, Splunk enhances observability, helping you identify and address issues quickly.

Integrating RT with Splunk Enterprise Security

Whenever something is detected in logs indicating a production problem or possible security issue, Splunk Enterprise Security triggers an alert. With the RT connector, you can select “RT” when configuring your action, and the alert will then automatically create a ticket. Your team is then immediately notified about any issues, allowing for faster triage, tracking, and resolution.

You can watch the process for setting up an alert below.

Video showing the RT Connect app running in Splunk.

Improve Alert Handling with Splunk and RT

Integrating Splunk with RT or RTIR can help improve your incident and alert handling processes, allowing your team to focus on fixes. These are just some of the benefits.

• Real-Time Response: As soon as an alert is generated in Splunk, a ticket can be created in RT, ensuring your team can respond without delay.

• Enhanced Observability: By leveraging Splunk’s log aggregation capabilities, you gain a clearer view of your IT infrastructure, making it easier to spot and resolve issues before they escalate.

• Improved Tracking: All incident-related information is automatically logged and tracked within RT, and tickets can be assigned to a team member, reviewed, prioritized, and ultimately resolved. All activity is recorded and communicated in RT.

Explore the Connector

To learn more about this connector and how it can benefit your organization, visit Splunkbase Apps and check out Best Practical's Connector for Splunk Enterprise Security.

Are you looking for more for your Splunk + RT integration? We’re always happy to work with customers to improve tools and integration. Send us an email to get the conversation started today.

Developer Preview: Request Tracker 6

We’re getting excited about the new features in RT 6, so we wanted to give you a first look at some of the updates coming soon. This release is packed with new features and enhancements designed to make your ticket management experience faster, more intuitive, and visually engaging. Here's a sneak peek at what’s in store:

1. Seamless Page Loading with HTMX

In RT6, we've integrated the htmx JavaScript library to deliver a smoother, more dynamic browsing experience. This means many page interactions, such as ticket updates and navigation, now happen without a full page reload. Watch the preview video to see how this new approach reduces friction and keeps you focused on your tasks.

Preview of page interaction in Request Tracker 6.

2. Modern Styling with Bootstrap Defaults

RT6 introduces some refreshed visuals, embracing more of the default styling provided by Bootstrap. This refresh not only modernizes the interface but also improves consistency across the application. Whether you're a long-time user or a new one, the cleaner design will make navigation and interaction more enjoyable.

Visual changes in RT 6

3. Faster Ticket Creation with Quick Ticket Create

Speed is essential when managing support requests. That’s why RT6 features a significantly improved "Quick Ticket Create" component. We've streamlined the process to make creating new tickets faster and more efficient than ever before. Check out the preview video to see this enhancement in action.

Quick ticket create in RT 6

These are just a few highlights of what’s coming in Request Tracker 6. We're committed to delivering a better user experience while maintaining the powerful functionality you rely on. Stay tuned for more updates and details as we approach the official release!

We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your feedback and let us know which feature you’re most excited about.

The Perl and Raku Conference 2024

Jason Crome from Best Practical recently attended the Perl and Raku Conference 2024 in sunny (and hot!) Las Vegas, Nevada. In addition to giving a talk about improving your README on github, Jason attended other presentations and pulled together a list of the most interesting. And the best part is that the conference posts all videos from the conference on YouTube for free, so you can watch too!

Building a Better README

If you watch the Request Tracker repository on GitHub, you may have noticed some big improvements in our README file over the past year. Traditionally the README file was a quick-start guide written in plain text and read in a terminal window. But GitHub has changed that dynamic and the README has become a project’s homepage for developers. A good README not only helps users understand a project but also attracts contributors and builds a stronger community around the code.

Jason shared some of what we learned as we revised our README, like deciding what information to include, how best to structure a README, and how to make it visually appealing and inviting to those unfamiliar with a project.

Build a Better README presentation

Modern Browser Automation in Perl Using Playwright

One of the ways we keep RT running correctly as we do new development is running our automated test suite, which includes more than 42,000 automated tests. Testing a web application involves simulating a browser to confirm things work as expected. As you might imagine, this requires some special libraries to run automatically on a server, and these libraries have changed over time.

One of the newer libraries for automated browser testing is called Playwright, and one of the presentations talked about how to manage Playwright from Perl. RT doesn’t use Playwright yet, but this gives us some interesting new ideas.

Playwright-Perl presentation

The Test2 Ecosystem: Next-Level Testing

Perl has a long history of providing a robust environment for automated testing. And like all technology, it’s always changing and improving. The Test2 Ecosystem provides an in-depth look at the Test2 Perl framework and many of the new tools and libraries now available. Updates include options to speed up tests, improved diagnostics, better control over test execution, and the ability to create custom testing tools.

Tips for your Next Las Vegas Vacation

No conference in Vegas would be complete without a nod to the city's iconic gaming scene. Casino Gaming for the Mathematically Inclined is a fascinating dive into the world of probability, statistics, and game theory as applied to casino games. R Geoffrey Avery explores the mathematical principles behind popular casino games like blackjack, poker, and roulette, explaining which games offer the best odds and which games should be avoided. Even if you don’t like the math, it’s a very helpful presentation before your next trip to Vegas.

Many More Presentations

We’ve covered just a tiny sample of the many presentations from the conference this year and you can search and view all of the other sessions on the Perl and Raku Conference YouTube channel. And if you search, you’ll see videos are available for past years as well, so there are many hours of great content to watch and learn from. Thanks to all of the organizers and presenters for another great conference!

RT for Incident Response (RTIR) Integration with MISP

In today's rapidly evolving cybersecurity landscape, staying ahead of potential threats requires effective threat intelligence sharing and streamlined incident response processes. The new integration between RTIR (Request Tracker for Incident Response) and the MISP Threat Sharing platform brings together two powerful tools to enhance your organization's security posture.

What is MISP?

MISP is an open-source threat intelligence platform designed to facilitate the sharing, storing, and correlation of structured threat information. It enables organizations to share indicators of compromise (IOCs) and other threat data with trusted partners, improving collective threat detection and response capabilities.

It works like a social network for cyber threats. It's a free, open-source platform that security professionals use to share valuable information about malware, vulnerabilities, and other threats. Imagine a bulletin board where everyone can post details about the latest cyber dangers they've encountered. This shared knowledge helps everyone stay informed and better prepared to defend against attacks.

Integrating with RTIR

Installing the MISP extension with RTIR offers several advantages:

• Seamless Threat Intelligence Sharing: Automatically pull threat data from MISP into RTIR, creating incidents based on the latest threat intelligence.

• Enhanced Incident Context: Access detailed threat information from MISP directly within RTIR incidents, enriching your incident response process.

• Streamlined Incident Management: Create and update MISP events from within RTIR, ensuring that your threat intelligence remains current and comprehensive.

You can see how the integration works in this short video demo.

Demo of the RTIR integration with MISP.

Key Features

Consume Event Feeds from MISP

After configuring the MISP integration, RTIR's External Feeds page will include a new MISP option. This feed pulls in events from MISP based on the configured number of days. From this feed display, you can create new RTIR tickets with information from the MISP events. If something from the feed impacts a service your team manages, you can then assign the incident for someone to research whether any action is needed for a particular threat.

MISP Portlet on Incident Display

On the Incident Display page in RTIR, if the custom field "MISP Event ID" has a value, a portlet named "MISP Event Details" will display details pulled from the MISP event via the MISP REST API. This provides quick access to valuable threat intelligence directly within RTIR. A link is also provided, so you can easily click to load the full MISP event if you need more details.

Update MISP Event

For incidents with a MISP Event ID, the Actions menu includes an option to "Update MISP Event." Selecting this action updates the existing MISP event with data from the RTIR incident ticket, ensuring that the threat intelligence remains up-to-date.

MISP has a defined RTIR object, and these attributes are automatically populated when you update the MISP event from RTIR.

RTIR Incident information uploaded to MISP.

Create MISP Event

If the MISP Event ID field is empty, the Actions menu shows an option to "Create MISP Event." This creates a new event in MISP with details from the RTIR incident ticket, facilitating the sharing of new threat intelligence.

Benefits of the Integration

Integrating RTIR with MISP provides several key benefits:

• Improved Efficiency: Automate the process of creating and updating incidents based on threat intelligence, reducing manual effort and speeding up response times.

• Enhanced Collaboration: Share threat data seamlessly between organizations, improving collective threat detection and response.

• Comprehensive Threat Management: Access detailed threat intelligence within incident tickets, providing context and aiding in more effective incident response.

Conclusion

The integration of RTIR and MISP offers a powerful combination for enhancing threat intelligence sharing and incident response processes. By automating the flow of threat data and providing detailed context within incident tickets, this integration helps organizations stay ahead of potential threats and respond more effectively.

If you haven't already, we encourage you to set up this integration and experience the benefits for yourself. For more information, visit bestpractical.com or contact our team.

Help us spread the word about RT

Photo by Miguel A Amutio on Unsplash

Best Practical has never been much of a marketing-driven company–RT has always grown by word of mouth. One of the things that we’re most proud of here is that RT isn’t a typical “product with customers”, but a product with a community. 

The features we add to RT are driven pretty directly by what our users want and need, and many of our most active community members come to us directly through personal referrals from people like you. Some members of the RT community contribute code. Others contribute documentation, bug reports, feature requests, and enthusiasm. 

If you find RT useful, we’d be grateful if you could help us make RT available to as many people and organizations as possible.

Share on Social Media

Social media posts have a powerful impact, as they help introduce RT to folks who might not find it on their own. 

If you follow us on LinkedIn, just reposting our blog posts when we publish them helps grow RT’s audience. Even if LinkedIn isn't usually your thing, logging in once a month or so to interact with our posts can really help.

The rest of the social media landscape is a bit fractured right now, but sharing anywhere else also helps. Dropping a link to an RT blog post you found interesting on Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter can also help new people discover RT. We also post videos on our YouTube channel and, as the saying goes, “please like and subscribe.” Finally, if you frequent discussion sites like Reddit and Hacker News, when you see a discussion about issue tracking or ticketing software, chime in with your experiences with RT.

Star RT on GitHub

If you have a GitHub account, giving us a star is a quick way to show your support. It helps increase RT’s visibility within the GitHub community, and is a quick and easy way to help show off RT’s vibrant and active community.

Write Reviews and Testimonials

Platforms like Capterra or G2 are popular with professionals looking for software recommendations. Sharing your experiences in a review can guide others in their decision-making process and simultaneously boost our profile.

Engage on our Forum

Our open community forum is a hub for community discussion about RT. Many new users start there looking for advice and guidance. If you have a bit of spare time, sharing your expertise and answering a question for a beginner can help them (and future users) get up to speed with RT.

Share your customizations on The RT Wiki

If you haven’t discovered it yet, check out the RT wiki at https://wiki.bestpractical.com. The wiki is filled with RT documentation, including customizations and code for interesting use cases for RT. If you have built something useful for your RT instance, odds are that many other users would find incredibly useful, too. It’s quick and easy to share your customizations and extensions on the wiki.

RT Community MVP

If you really love RT and have extra time, you could think about some bigger projects.

Contribute a Case Study

We're starting the process of publishing selected case studies on https://bestpractical.com to help new users understand the many different ways RT is used across a large number of industries. If you'd like us to feature your organization’s use of RT, we'd love to chat. Get started by reaching out to feedback@bestpractical.com.

Give a Talk on RT

Put together a presentation inside your organization to help your users learn more about the RT system they have available to them. It's amazing how a few tips and tricks can unlock features for people who are already regular users of RT.

Talks on RT also make great sessions for conferences or professional organization meetings. You might give a talk on how your organization uses RT or even a talk on getting started with a ticketing system using RT. We’d be delighted to help support you as you put together your talk. Additionally, we’d be happy to provide a demo RT instance for your presentation. If your presentation is recorded and publicly accessible, let us know and we can link to it.

Your Impact

Your help has a profound impact. By supporting Request Tracker, you are not just advocating for a tool you use, but you are also contributing to the spirit of open source—collaboration and freedom. Our success is not just measured by the functionality of our software, but by the strength and enthusiasm of our community.

Thank you for being an integral part of what makes Request Tracker amazing. We wouldn’t be where we are today without your involvement and together we’re going to continue to make RT even better for many years to come!

Could Formula 1 Change Lanes from Excel to Request Tracker for Asset Tracking?

Image of Williams Racing F1 car by Adriaan Greyling on Pexels.

In the high-octane world of Formula 1 racing, every detail counts. From aerodynamics to engine performance, teams strive for perfection in every aspect of their cars' design and construction. But Ars Technica tells the story of a Formula 1 team reaching the limits of MS Excel as a system to track their massive parts inventory.

This story got us thinking, RT's asset tracking system could help handle their challenges, and the process shouldn't be "viciously expensive".

The Excel Challenge

As described in the article, the Formula 1 team's massive parts list (over 20,000 rows!) pushed past the limitations of Excel when it came to tracking and managing their assets. With thousands of parts to monitor and coordinate, Excel workbooks can quickly become cumbersome and inefficient. Even simple details like the current state of a part (backordered, inspected, etc.) could not be easily determined.

How RT Could Rev Up the System

By transitioning from Excel to Request Tracker for asset tracking, Formula 1 teams could unlock a wealth of benefits, including:

• Using configurable asset lifecycles, asset status and availability are immediately available

• Multiple Catalogs can be used to track different categories of parts, each with its own lifecycle and metadata

• Work and tasks associated with parts can be tracked on linked tickets

• Enhanced collaboration and communication among team members as everyone can work in the system at the same time

• Gaining insights using asset search, reporting, and dashboards

• Improved decision-making through data-driven insights

Plus, all changes are tracked and audited so you know what updates have been made, when, and by which logged in user.

Seamless Data Migration with the RT Asset Importer

One of the key concerns when transitioning from Excel to a new asset tracking system like Request Tracker (RT) is the seamless transfer of existing data. Fortunately, RT offers a powerful solution for this challenge: the RT-Extension-Assets-Import-CSV extension.

The RT-Extension-Assets-Import-CSV extension enables teams to effortlessly import asset data from Excel spreadsheets into RT's centralized platform. You export your Excel spreadsheet in the CSV format, set up your RT assets with all of the fields you want to capture from the spreadsheet, then configure the extension to map the Excel columns to asset fields. Then you run the utility and all of your data is imported into RT.

Benefits of Automated Import

Automating the import process offers several benefits:

• Time Savings: By eliminating manual data entry tasks, teams can save valuable time and resources during the transition process.

• Accuracy: The automated import process reduces the risk of human error associated with manual data entry, ensuring that asset information is transferred accurately.

• Efficiency: Teams can quickly onboard existing asset data into RT, allowing them to leverage the platform's features and functionalities without delay.

• Scalability: The extension supports the import of large volumes of asset data, making it suitable for teams of all sizes and asset inventories.

RT is Ready to Join the Pit Crew

In the fast-paced world of Formula 1 racing, every advantage counts. With Request Tracker, we think teams could accelerate their journey towards efficiency and performance excellence. By harnessing the power of RT's asset tracking system and the RT-Extension-Assets-Import-CSV extension, Formula 1 teams can seamlessly migrate their asset data, streamline workflows, and drive towards victory on the track.

If anyone at the Williams team is still looking for a solution, we'd be happy to give you a test drive.

RT 5.0.6 Now Available

Chart showing assets by brand in Request Tracker 5.0.6

Following up on Star Wars Day and Cinco de Mayo, we thought May 6th needed something special, so we're happy to release RT 5.0.6 today (5/6). If you use assets with RT, you're going to like this release. If you don't, what are you waiting for? Go check out this new intro to assets video to see what you're missing.

This release includes some updates, new features, and fixes. Some notable updates are described here. Full details and release notes are linked in the forum post below.

• RT 5.0.6 Released

Assets Improvements

If you’re not familiar with RT’s asset tracking, it’s a built-in feature that allows you to track pretty much anything you want. It was originally designed for IT assets, like computers and printers, or cloud assets like servers and databases. But it can be used to track any sort of inventory, from office supplies to medical devices to car parts.

This new release adds features to assets to catch up with existing ticket features, including inline edit on asset pages and improved autocomplete on asset links. Asset search results in the query builder also now support filtering from the headers like tickets.

Filter assets in search results

Charts

Asset and transaction query builder searches both now support charts, so you can visualize your asset information or transaction details. You can save charts and add them to dashboards just like tickets (see the screenshot at the top of the post for an example).

Charts also have a new feature allowing you to manage the x-axis in your charts. If your x-axis displays a count, like the number of tickets created per Requestor, you can now sort the results by that count rather than alphabetically by Requestor name. And if you have a large number of results with many smaller values, you can limit the chart to showing just the top results. So in the previous example, you might want to see just the top 10 Requestors by ticket count and not show all of the Requestors who created only 1 ticket.

Chart showing tickets created by top 10 Requestors

Lifecycles

Now that the graphical lifecycle editor has been out for a while, we took some time to improve lifecycle management based on feedback from users. We implemented several changes to make it easier to manage lifecycles, including automatically removing statuses from various places in the lifecycle when it is deleted from the graph. We also added a button to automatically populate mappings when the statuses are the same. So if you have two lifecycles that are very similar, you can now click on the maps page to automatically set the "new" <-> "new", "open" <-> "open", etc. There are a few other small fixes that should improve lifecycle management or just make it a little easier.

Upgrading

We include everything you need to upgrade RT in each release, and staying up-to-date gives you great new features. Also, the upgrade process is simpler when you only need to move one minor version. If you just don’t have time to manage new versions, we also offer a fully managed cloud RT and we’ll take care of the upgrades for you. However you manage your RT, we hope you enjoy the new version!