This isn't a how-to technical question. I'm just
interested in how others are using OTRS.
We are a small IT company and until recently we were
running OTRS 2.47 with ITSM on an Amazon EC2 Small instance.
We replaced a commercial helpdesk system which used the JBOSS
stack on a Windows box about a year and a half ago with OTRS
2.47. The old helpdesk was ugly, buggy and barely ran. OTRS
did everything we wanted and reduced our costs because a Linux
instance was less expensive. We were very happy and have
never thought about turning back.
Recently Amazon had a hiccup with their EBS storage and I
took advantage of that hiccup to go ahead and upgrade OTRS.
Provisioned an Ubuntu VM on an internal server, installed
OTRS 2.47 with ITSM and uploaded our database to it, then
upgraded to OTRS 3.0.11 using source.
I provisioned one of the new low-cost EC2 Micro instances
using a Canonical Ubuntu 10.04LTS image, then installed 3.0.11
from source, then uploaded the upgraded database from our
internal server and pointed the OTRS installation to the new
database.. The Micro instance gives us a dedicated OTRS
server in the Amazon cloud, and the cost with EBS storage and
an Elastic IP address is less than $18 per month running 24/7.
The micro instance performs well - no latency or lagginess
issues at all in our experience ( the old Windows helpdesk
would not even be able to run on a Micro instance).
One thing that has gotten easier is the mail configuration
- We use Google Apps as our email engine, and 3.0.11 was a
snap to set up using Google Apps. Once I got database backups
scripted then scheduled weekly system snapshots we were set.
The new interface is very slick and also seems to display
better in mobile devices - I can use my Android phone to work
tickets on the native OTRS interface, but I am hoping to see a
customized interface for Android like the one that's already
working on iPhone.
That's a snapshot of our experience - I'm interested to see
if anyone else is hosting OTRS in the Amazon cloud and to hear
of what other platforms people are using. If anyone needs help
getting OTRS running in the Amazon cloud we'll be glad to answer
questions as well.
I've worked with dozens of ticketing systems in over 20 years
of IT work, and nothing else even comes close to OTRS in terms
of bang for buck. Kudos to the dev team and the community!