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!

Managing AWS Reservations with Request Tracker Assets

Photo by Christian Wiediger Unsplash.

Want to use AWS reservations to save money, but have trouble matching your reservations to your EC2 servers? Or maybe you want to spread out your reservations, but need an easy way to get a list of servers that currently don't have a reservation? AWS reporting doesn't currently make this possible, but Request Tracker’s asset system can.

Understanding AWS Reservations

If you run services like EC2 and RDS on AWS, you probably know that there are several levels of pricing based on how long you can commit to using the services. On-demand is the most flexible because you can deprovision it at any time, so it's also the most expensive. If you can commit to a longer term, like a year or more, you can sign up for "reserved instances" and get a lower price.

When you sign up for these reservations, AWS asks for a bunch of information about the servers you are committing to. These are details like the region, the type of server (t3.medium, etc.), and the platform (Linux, etc.). For the reservation to get credited on your bill correctly, all of the reservation information must match up with your running servers.

When you start running more than a few services, tracking all of this information to make sure your reservations are being used can become a challenge. AWS has a utilization report that will tell you in aggregate if your reservations are being used or not. But this report doesn't connect specific EC2 or RDS instances with a reservation. This can be good if you remove an instance and then create a new one because the reservation will transfer. But if you want to review all active services and figure out which reservations are being used where, the AWS reporting doesn't provide that.

RT Asset Tracking

RT's asset tracking system is designed to record this kind of information, so we decided to start tracking our AWS resources and reservations in RT to help us match the two together.

To start, we needed to get the AWS assets created in RT. AWS has extensive APIs to access information about your resources, so we created a utility to fetch data about EC2 and RDS instances and create an asset record for each. We put all of these in one catalog called "AWS Resources".

Next we wanted to track our purchased reservations. We created a new catalog called "AWS Reserved Instances" to track those, since they aren't really the same thing as an EC2 or RDS instance. We also wanted to track different asset details on reservations, like start and end dates. Reservations also have "states" in AWS, so we were able to map that to the asset status and create a custom asset lifecycle with all of the AWS state values like "pending payment", "active", and "retired".

Once we had all of the information sync'd from AWS, we could start making sense of it. We started by creating some categories of assets using a few saved searches. We put them all in a dashboard like the one below so we could see what we had.

AWS asset dashboard in Request Tracker

Assigning Existing Reservations

The first thing we wanted to do is connect reservations with a matching resource. This mapping is very useful for tracking what we have purchased, but it just doesn't exist in the AWS interface.

Assets have links, similar to tickets, so we decided to link each resource asset with a reservation asset. To make that easy, we created a saved asset search called "Unlinked AWS Reservations", which is the third search above. This is all reservations without a linked asset, which at first was all of them.

In the search results, we added a custom column called "Link to Resource". Each reservation in the results then had a link to a new page that showed all AWS assets (EC2s, RDSs) that matched the details of that reservation. So a reservation for an EC2 t3.medium in us-east-1 would show all matching EC2 assets that also were not linked yet. This is important, because we need to make sure our linking aligns with the AWS rules for counting reservations in our bill.

To link them, we pick one from the list and click Link. We worked through all of our existing reservations until all were linked and our "Unlinked AWS Reservations" was empty.

Buying New Reservations

In our case, we didn't have a reservation for every AWS asset, so when we were done linking, our "EC2 Instances without Reservations" and "RDS Instances without Reservations" still had some assets. These two lists now became our shopping list for new reservations.

The tricky part about reservations is you need to manually fill out all of the fields in the AWS interface. If you get any fields wrong, your reservation won't match an existing resource and you'll end up paying for the unused reservation.

Previously we would keep an EC2 or RDS AWS console page open in one browser window, then open another browser window with the “buy” form, and carefully check every value. This was tricky because the values are at different locations all over the EC2 and RDS pages.

With our new asset searches, we modified the search layout to show all of the information needed to buy a reservation, and we put the values in the same order as the reservation form. This makes it much easier to buy new reservations with less stress.

We used this process to buy some new reservations now that we could easily see what was needed. Then we re-ran our import utility and the new reservations showed up in "Unlinked AWS Reservations". We followed the previous process and got them all linked until we had the coverage level we wanted.

Expiring Reservations

When you buy a reservation, you commit to some term, like 1, 2, or 3 years. Based on what you picked, the reservation record will have a duration. We use that duration to figure out the reservation end date and store that on the asset. This information helps populate the top two searches on our dashboard, "Recently Retired AWS Reservations" and "Expiring AWS Reservations".

The first is reservations that are now retired, so assets that previously had a reservation are no longer covered. That means our bill just went up and we need to buy a new reservation to get savings for another year.

To help plan ahead, "Expiring AWS Reservations" looks ahead 60 days to let us know which ones will be expiring soon.

Using these two searches, we can plan to buy new reservations at regular intervals. We can also watch the EC2 and RDS searches to see any new instances that might be added.

Connecting AWS with Your Business

The visibility we gained from linking the reservations was a huge win for us and saved a bunch of time we previously spent trying to understand what systems had reservations and where more were needed. But now that we have AWS asset records in RT, we can do even more. We can link them to customer tickets, link them to change management activity, and link them to sales and contract activity which is also tracked on tickets. Our AWS resources are now integrated into all of our other processes, which is a huge win given how important AWS is in our hosting business.

Does any of the above sound familiar? If you are trying to manage AWS resources via the AWS console, but having a hard time linking that to your other business processes, drop us a line. We'd love to share our experience and talk about how Request Tracker can bring some organization to your AWS infrastructure.

Streamlining Change Management with Simple Request Tracker Extension

Image of wrenches by Dmitriy Demidov on Unsplash.

Managing change in a hosting environment is a complex task that can involve adding new services, software updates, and configuration changes. Request Tracker (RT) provides all of the tools to schedule and track these changes, especially using the Change Management extension we showed recently. But this scheduling and tracking can only happen if the change management tickets are created and all of the fields are set, and this can be a challenge for a busy team.

We had exactly this case in our hosted RT environment. Customers write in to support with various requests and sometimes these require a change on their hosted RT system. We want to track those changes and it was taking extra time for our support team to create and fill out these change management requests. So we created a small extension to make this easier.

Goals for the new Extension

Before we got to work, we identified our main goals for the new extension.

1. Create a Link on Support Tickets

To make change management easy, we wanted a single link on support tickets that would take the user to a create ticket page with the Change Management queue selected.

2. Link Location

We could have created a single link, possibly in the Actions menu on the ticket. But looking at past tickets, we realized we often wanted to quote a specific transaction, usually the reply that explained the requested change. Based on that, we decided to put a link on each transaction in the ticket history which allowed us to quote the text in that reply.

3. Pre-filled Fields

When our staff clicked the link, we wanted to automatically fill out as much information as possible on the new change management ticket. This would make creating the ticket much easier, and reduce the risk of human error.

4. Ticket Linking

To make it easy to trace every change, we wanted the new change management ticket be linked to the support request that asked for the change. We also wanted the change to show up in a list of all changes for that customer.

Building the Extension

Adding a single link is a small change, made easy using callbacks and other tools RT makes available for building extensions. When we started to add more details, like all of the fields we wanted to set automatically, it got a little more involved, but not much. Luckily our team has some experience building RT extensions.

Our Updated Change Flow

Image showing a wrench icon in the RT ticket history.

Our new extension adds a wrench icon on each transaction for support tickets that fits right in with the existing reply and comment icons. We included some logic to look up information on the customer's support contract and only add the wrench if the customer uses our hosting.

The main fields on the change management ticket are automatically filled out based on our most common changes.

• The Owner is the current user.

• The Status defaults to deployed and the Change Type is Standard, since most changes are standard and done right away as we handle the request.

• The Change Completed date defaults to when the ticket is created, assuming the change has been done.

• The Customer custom role is automatically set to the customer's group, which will make the change ticket show up in the list of changes for that customer.

• The text of the reply in the support ticket is included in the content box.

• The new Change Management ticket is linked to the support request.

Screenshot of a change management ticket with fields automatically filled out.

All of these fields can be changed by the user before the ticket is created. We set the defaults based on the most common case, but it still supports other situations, like scheduling a change for a few days later.

Change Management Best Practices

Implementing this small extension helped our process in several ways:

• Efficiency: Support staff can initiate change management tickets with a single click, saving time and reducing the chance of errors.

• Consistency: The pre-filled fields ensure that all necessary information is captured consistently, following best practices.

• Transparency: The linkage between support and change management tickets provides transparency into why changes were initiated and their impact.

• Auditability: All changes are documented and can be audited for compliance and accountability purposes.

RT gives you the flexibility and freedom to customize your system to make routine tasks fast and easy for your staff. While implementing custom solutions can take some time, this is offset by the day-to-day savings once it's up and running for your users.

Ready to get started with some changes of your own? Check our documentation to start building your own extension. You might even see if you can get some help from one of the AI tools out there now available, many of which know how to write RT code.

If you’re looking for some hands-on help with extending RT to meet your specific needs and business goals, reach out to us to explore what you can achieve!

New Year's Resolution: Become Indistractable at Work with Request Tracker

Nir Eyal's new book, "Indistractable," is a beacon for everyone struggling with the daily mental tug-of-war at work. He offers actionable steps to reclaim your focus and achieve laser-sharp productivity. But let's be honest, implementing these strategies requires more than willpower alone. That's where Request Tracker comes in – a shared platform for conquering workplace distractions and keeping your boss in the loop.

Scheduled Syncing Explained

Eyal was recently on the podcast Lenny's Podcast and he explains how syncing with your boss can help you with your quest to become indistractable. Here is the part of the podcast where they talk about priority and syncing.

Scheduled syncing section of Nir Eyal’s episode on Lenny’s Podcast.

You can use your calendar and set up this weekly meeting with your boss, but what if there was a view of everything you were working on that your boss could check whenever they have time in their busy schedule? What if they could get an email update as you make progress throughout the day? What if they could go in and update the priority of a task directly, leaving you a note explaining why? Request Tracker makes all of this possible.

A Team Approach

Eyal emphasizes the importance of "externalizing your commitments." Request Tracker does exactly that. Ditch the sticky notes and mental to-do lists, and pour your tasks into the system. Categorize them, set priorities, and assign due dates. Suddenly, the overwhelming chaos transforms into a manageable shared roadmap.

And unlike individual to-do apps built just for you, RT's team-based system is built for collaboration. Give your boss an account, and you can create dashboards they can quickly view whenever they need to. Create accounts for your team and everyone can see what's happening and make updates as they complete tasks.

View Tasks Your Way

Eyal also talks about a "Timeboxing" technique. Request Tracker lets you break down large projects into smaller, time-bound tasks. You can then set a Starts and Due date and time to schedule your work at whatever level of detail you need. You'll be amazed at how much more you can accomplish in a distraction-free zone.

The simplest view of your plan for the week can be a list of the task tickets you have created, filtered by the tasks due this week, and sorted by priority. You can also get the calendar view you want using the free RTx::Calendar extension we recently talked about.

Screenshot of a calendar view of one week of task tickets in Request Tracker

Prefer to keep your tasks and reserved time in your main calendar? No problem. RT can provide an iCal compatible feed of any set of task tickets and you can subscribe to this from your main calendar. Events from RT will then show up in your main calendar where other non-RT users can see them.

Keeping Your Boss in the Loop (Without the Micromanagement)

Transparency is key to a healthy work relationship. Request Tracker's real-time updates and progress reports keep your boss informed without the constant need for check-ins. They see what you're working on, the progress you're making, and any roadblocks you're facing. No more frantic "What's on your plate?" emails or nerve-wracking status meetings.

Collaboration Without the Collision

Eyal highlights the importance of "frictionless collaboration." Request Tracker fosters seamless teamwork. Assign tasks to colleagues, share updates, and track progress together. No more chasing down teammates or deciphering cryptic email threads.

As you are getting control of your attention, you don't want to do so at the expense of your boss or coworkers. Request Tracker's notification settings keep you in sync with your team at whatever level makes sense. Add team members as watchers on individual tasks they need to see, remove them from personal task tickets, and mute individual updates that don't need an email.

And everyone on the team can delete email worry-free because Request Tracker keeps a record of all updates right on the ticket. In the future, they can always check the ticket if they missed an update. No need to create yet another email folder to track updates.

Becoming Indistractable, One Request at a Time

Nir Eyal's "Indistractable" offers a powerful framework, and Request Tracker provides the tools to translate theory into action. It's your digital assistant, your focus facilitator, and your communication machine. So, ditch the distractions, embrace the power of Request Tracker, and watch your productivity – and peace of mind – skyrocket. Remember, a focused you is an unstoppable you.

Ready to reclaim your focus and become indistractable at work? Sign up for a Request Tracker demo today and experience the difference!