Fault Report and Tracking System enquiry?

[<Juan.Guzman@csiro.au>]

Dear EPICS community,

I'm currently doing an evaluation of technologies to use (or customise) for our Fault Report System. The current astronomical observatories ATCA, Parkes and Mopra use an in-house developed Fault Report and Tracking System being maintained by only one person, it is not easily extensible or flexible and has some issues around searching and reporting. Putting some effort on updating it is not cheap considering that they might be other alternatives available.

Our main requirements/use cases are:

• Easy creation of faults that affects observations by all kind of users, including observers (which do not have a CSIRO account). The users should not need to login, and an email should suffice or entering via a web page
• Fault tracking and customised workflows (assign tickets to individuals or groups)
• Ability to support multiple projects, telescopes, systems (hierarchical configuration)
• Email notifications, and possible updating the fault log via email
• Web client (and mobile clients would be a plus)
• Ability to do easy search for past faults, recurrent faults (link faults)
• Customised search and API for advanced data mining

We have experience with a project tracking tool call Redmine that we are using for the ASKAP project but I'm also interested in other popular software development tracking tool call JIRA that can be customised for this type of workflows. I'm going to trial JIRA in the upcoming weeks.

I was wondering what is being used at other facilities as a Fault Report and Tracking System? Do you have a commercial generic workflow framework? Do you have a complete in-house product catered for your needs?

Any input/comments/thoughts are very welcome.

Kind regards,

  JC.

Juan Carlos Guzman 
ATNF Software and Computing Group Leader
Astronomy and Space Science
CSIRO

E juan.guzman@csiro.au T +61 2 9372 4457 M +61 432 699 791 
PO Box 76, Epping, NSW, 1710 | Vimiera & Pembroke Rd, Marsfield, NSW, 2122 Australia
www.csiro.au | www.csiro.au/CASS

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