Remedy: It's Good for What Ails You

By Christopher Strauss, Computing Systems Support Database Administrator

This is the February 2000 revision of an article that was in the September 1998 issue of Benchmarks Online. More revisions may be made in the future and the latest version can always be found at the UNT Remedy Website HELP DESK CENTRAL.

Note: As of December 1999 the notifications will appear to come from arsystem@antidote.acs.unt.edu instead of arsystem@remedy.acs.unt.edu, and will show a Reply To: address of arstrap@antidote.acs.unt.edu.

My Remedy what!? has been resolved???

Wondering what the following E-mail message that you just received means? Are you curious about what Remedy is, and why it is sending you mail?  

To: <your email address here>
From: arsystem@antidote.acs.unt.edu
Subject: Case HD0000000017022 has been resolved.

Your Remedy Case HD0000000017022 has been resolved.  Modify Confirm Resolution to close or reopen the case at http://arsWeb.unt.edu/cgi-bin/expandhd.pl?case=HD0000000017022.

The answer lies in a project that the University's computer support staff embarked upon in 1997. The Distributed Computer Support Management Team (DCSMT) of the University of North Texas, a subcommittee of the Information Resources Council (IRC), resolved in 1996 to select and deploy a campus-wide trouble call tracking system for computer support problems. We selected and purchased the Remedy Action Request System in the fall of 1997, and spent the 1997-1998 school year installing, configuring, and customizing it. We implemented the system in most of the campus computer support groups during the summer of 1998.

As we begin the year 2000, all of the academic units and most of the administrative units have been trained and are in production, using Remedy as their automated trouble call tracking system. As the use of this system increases on our campus, the likelihood that YOU will receive a message from arsystem@antidote.acs.unt.edu increases as well. You may find it useful to have a little bit of background information about our system, and about the messages it sends.

What Remedy does for the University

The primary purpose of Remedy is to provide a central tracking system for every conceivable type of computer support action. Key features provided by this system are:

• Notifies groups of support staff members by various means (E-mail, pager) as soon as a new case (trouble ticket) is entered into the system and assigned to them.

• Notifies the customer via E-mail as the ticket is placed in various states such as "Work in Progress, Pending, Resolved, and Closed."

• Enables distributed support staff to quickly escalate problems to central computing staff where appropriate, while maintaining continuous feedback to the customer.

• Provides follow-up and escalation actions for problems that are not being resolved in a timely manner.

• Empowers the customer to decide whether or not the problem was resolved, and if not, allows them to easily reopen the ticket via ARWeb or Remedy Web, which automatically notifies the support staff of that fact.

• Stores solutions to problems in a database that can be searched directly from the trouble ticket screen, and will ultimately be available to all customers as well.

• Enables customers to enter their own trouble tickets into interactive Web forms that are forwarded directly to their primary computer support staff (either the distributed area or the central helpdesk).

A word on escalations

Remedy ships with a fairly simple escalation process. Cases that age to a certain threshold send an escalation message to the assigned group AND the group's manager that the case is now "escalated." The thresholds are 4 hours for Urgent, 8 hours for High, 2 days for Medium, and 4 days for Low priority cases. See Case Urgency, Priority, and Response (Escalation) Times for more details on case urgency and prioritization. There is currently no escalation engine searching for aging tickets and re-escalating them as necessary. The system has this capability, and follow-on escalation processes will be added later as refinements.

What Remedy means to you

Interpreting the Messages and Using the ARWeb Interface to Respond

From a customer's perspective, Remedy means a number of things. For one, you can expect to be asked for your UNT Enterprise Userid (EUID) or UNT ID number when calling computer support staff for assistance. This enables them to quickly pick your customer record out of the 56,000 already loaded into the system, and get on with recording the facts of your problem. If you have more than one role at the university (student and staff) you will have more than one customer record in the system. They can search on name, but it is slightly harder to do; the names are loaded from the HRMIS and SIMS mainframe databases and are in the form of your full, legal name, not what you usually go by.

For another, it means being told what your trouble ticket number is (the Remedy Case number you will see in E-mail later, minus all the leading zeros) if the support staff cannot resolve your problem over the phone. In part, this depends upon how the support staff in your college or administrative area is using Remedy. Some areas enter all work in the system as they take calls, while others only enter items that require follow-up actions. It depends a lot upon how large your support staff is. You may ask that they enter a trouble ticket for you if it is clear that they are not doing so, and you want this problem tracked through resolution and closure. With ARWeb, you are able to do this for yourself.

Finally, if you have an E-mail address in the system (ask, and the support staff person can look up what we have listed for you in your customer profile), you will get notification messages if or when your case is changed to one of the various Remedy statuses. These are Work in Progress, Pending, Resolved, and Closed. The messages will look like the examples below, accounting for the fact that if the field contents are too long (especially Short Description), the message may be truncated somewhat by a character length limitation on the notification generator. Several of them contain World Wide Web URLs (Universal Resource Locators) that lead to a Web interface where you can modify your trouble ticket directly, and fill out a Customer Satisfaction Survey.

Work in Progress:

Subject: Work on Case HD0000000017022 is now in progress.

Work is now in progress on your case HD0000000017022, Short Desc: <whatever the support staff used to describe your problem>. If you have any information or questions, contact (group/person) <your distributed support group / member of that support group and a phone number>.

This message indicates that a support staff member has picked up your case in Remedy and has changed its status to "Work in Progress." It is a clear indication that someone is paying attention to your problem, and usually provides telephone point of contact information for the group assigned your case.

Pending:

Subject: Work has stopped on your Case HD0000000017022 Pending Requester Information.

Contact (group/person) <your distributed support group / member of that support group and a phone number> with information/questions or edit case at http://arsWeb.unt.edu/cgi-bin/expandhd.pl?case=HD0000000017022.

This message indicates that something is delaying the resolution of your ticket. Possible choices (and explanations) for Pending are:

• Classroom Availability (we can't fix it while the classroom is in use)

• Classroom Support Services (this has to be taken care of by the Classroom Support Group, a division of Micro Maintenance)

• Micro Maintenance (we sent it to Micro Maintenance to fix, or are waiting on them to get here to fix it)

• Parts (we, a support contract rep, or Micro Maintenance need to obtain parts in order to install them)

• Requester Information (we asked you to try something, and have not heard back from you)

• Requester Availability (we cannot look at the problem until you are in your office and available)

• Software Availability (you asked us to install software that we do not have, or a newly released version that we do not have legally available yet)

• Staff Availability (either there are not enough of us to go around, or we have no one who is qualified to work on that problem until we hire a replacement)

• Testing (we are trying to recreate the problem you reported, or are testing a system before releasing it to you for use)

• Vendor Response (we have called the vendor about it and they have not given us a solution, or may not have responded yet, or they keep calling it a feature)

Also, cases that are Pending DO NOT ESCALATE, so you may want to keep an eye on them. Using ARWeb, you are able to manually escalate a case yourself by Modifying it and selecting "Yes" in the Escalated? field pull-down. See the instructions below for Resolved: cases on how to access the ARWeb site and modify a case. The field you will want to change looks like this:

and again, you simply select "Yes" from the pull-down to escalate your case. An escalation sends a notice to the assigned support group and their manager that the case has escalated. You may want to enter text in the Work Log field to explain why you escalated the case.

Resolved:

Subject: Case HD0000000017022 has been resolved.

Your Remedy Case HD0000000017022 has been resolved.  Modify Confirm Resolution to close or reopen the case at http://arsWeb.unt.edu/cgi-bin/expandhd.pl?case=HD0000000017022.

This message indicates that the assigned support staff believe that they have resolved your problem. The Web URL allows you to connect directly to ARWeb and open the trouble ticket that you have been notified about. You will first have to log in to the authentication screen with your UNT EUID, which is typically your initials and a serial number in the form "abc1234."  The login screen will look like this.

Once you have logged in, the Entry screen will display your Remedy Case in read-only form (below).  You may look at the Work Log near the bottom of the form to see how your case was resolved. If you want to Close or Reopen the case, click on the Modify link to the left of the Case ID+.

This will open your case in a modification form (below). Click on the Confirm Resolution field pull-down and select either "Close Case" or "Reopen Case" as shown below. If you are reopening the case, you may want to enter some text in the Work Log field to clarify for the support staff what is still wrong.

Next click on the Save Changes button. You will see a message that the support staff has been informed of the Assigned case (the system re-notifies the group that was last assigned to your case.

Finally, scroll down and click on the Logout button to end your session on ARWeb, BEFORE closing the browser window.

Closed:

Subject: Your Remedy Case HD0000000017022 has been closed.

Your Case, Short Desc: <whatever the support staff used to describe your problem>, has been closed. The closure code is Automatically Closed. Contact (group/person) <your distributed support group / member of that support group and a phone number> if this problem reoccurs in the future.

This message indicates that the 15-day automatic closure has taken place on a ticket of yours that was resolved three weeks ago. A closed ticket cannot be reopened, and if you still have the problem a new ticket will have to be opened for you.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

Subject: Customer Satisfaction Survey - HelpDesk Case (HD0000000017022) 

Please open http://arsWeb.unt.edu/cgi-bin/expandsvy.pl?case=HD0000000017022 on the Web. Click on the "Modify" link, and fill out the Customer Satisfaction Survey.

This message provides a link to a short Customer Satisfaction Survey that was created for you when your ticket was Closed, either by you or the 15-day automatic closure process. The Web URL allows you to connect directly to ARWeb and open the Survey. Again, you will first have to log in to the authentication screen with your UNT EUID, which is typically your initials and a serial number in the form "abc1234." Once you have done that, ARWeb will display your Survey.

Click on the Modify link to open the Survey form. Enter a numeric rating for each Assessment statement, ranging from the strongest disagreement (worst rating) at 1 to the strongest agreement (best rating) at 10.  Enter any comments you want to make in the Comments fields for the specific Assessment. Please keep in mind that this survey is tied to a single Help Desk Case, and try to limit your comments to that specific support transaction. Next click on the Save Changes button to report your assessment to the management group of the assigned support area.

Finally, scroll down and click on the Logout button to end your session on ARWeb, BEFORE closing the browser window.

About the Notifications

The text in these messages has been refined several times since we started deploying the system. The messages that shipped with the product were more cryptic and less helpful. They are still rather limited by the length of the text that we can include. These messages were changed again once ARWeb was deployed for direct customer access, and in some cases include a direct link that will take your Web browser to the UNT Remedy Website, prompt you to log in, and then will go directly to your trouble ticket. In addition, they include support group telephone numbers whenever possible to facilitate your contacting them.

What Remedy does for UNT customers (all computer and information system users)

As mentioned above, the component of Remedy that will affect customers the most is ARWeb. The ARWeb interface is a JavaScript-based Web site product that provides direct access to the Remedy system. As of December 1999, customers may authenticate to this system with essentially the same login and password (EUID and UNT ID) that they use to authenticate to the Library CD-ROM Website and WebCT courses now (computer support staff usually have a different login name). Once connected, they are able to:

• Enter trouble tickets for themselves in an interactive Web form.

• Check the status of their own trouble tickets, close them once they have been resolved, and reopen them if they have not really been resolved.

• Search the solution knowledgebase before opening a new trouble ticket.

• Fill out a customer satisfaction survey, following a prompt after trouble call closure.

THE BEST WAY TO ACCESS ARWeb IS TO START AT HELP DESK CENTRAL!!

Open the Help Desk Central Home Page at http://remedy.unt.edu/helpdesk .  Many useful links appear right on the home page, such as current Bulletins about system outages. Select Customers on the top frame of the Web page, and you will find more detailed instructions as well as a list of links on the left that open directly into the ARWeb forms to the Remedy database. Select Request Queues to see what cases are open in your business or academic unit. BOOKMARK this Help Desk Central Web for future reference; this is your one-stop shopping center for Web-based technical support at the University of North Texas.

Additional Information

For those who want to know more about Remedy, and why we selected it for the University of North Texas

Who is Remedy? According to their own annual report at www.remedy.com :

"Remedy Corporation is the world's leading provider of automated help desk solutions designed to increase employee and organizational productivity across the enterprise. Addressing the needs of the consolidated operations management (COM) market, Remedy's easy to use and deploy, scalable, and highly adaptable technology and products extend beyond the help desk to include such applications as change management, asset management, defect tracking, and more."

The Remedy Action Request System is not a homebrew application, nor is it cheap, but it is one that is used on an international scale by organizations such as 3M, AT&T, AutoDesk, Bell Canada, Boeing, CNN, DoD, EDS, GTE Internet, Mobil, Pacific Bell, and Telecom Italia. A large number of universities have Remedy in production, and we have been in contact with many of them while bringing up our system: Baylor Medical, Duke, Harvard, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Georgia Tech, Missouri, Northwestern, NYU, Ohio State, Stanford, U of Georgia, U of Miami, and U of Houston.

Of these, Northwestern University has one of the most extensive deployments, with a large number of their business applications unified around a single, central Remedy database of university customers. Ohio State has used Remedy to automate almost every aspect of computer E-mail account creation, management, and problem resolution for 70,000 customers on five campuses. As you can imagine, the computer support staff at UNT will be looking for ways to incorporate useful and proven ideas from the more experienced administrators at other universities into our own system. We are confident that we made a good choice in selecting a powerful, adaptable, and almost infinitely customizable system for our campus computer users.

The Significance of the University of North Texas Implementation of the Remedy Action Request System

For the first time in UNT computing history, a common software package has been chosen, purchased, and implemented by all computing support areas with these shared goals:

• Prevent and solve computing problems in a timely manner.

• Bring central and distributed computing support areas together.

• Provide a tool to measure and justify support costs.

• Combine expert knowledge from all of the support areas into one central database.

• Reduce knowledge-loss when employees leave UNT, a recurring problem in our technical support staff areas.

A campus-wide selection and implementation project is NOT the norm for the majority of those Universities that use Remedy. Almost every other campus that uses it (or a competing helpdesk automation product) has only a partial implementation, in only a few of their academic units or administrative areas. By our decision to do this as a university-wide project, we are already much closer to reaching our goals than many campuses that have been using Remedy for years. The Call Tracking Implementation Group (Remedy Steering Committee) will continue to work towards achieving these goals as we refine the system and add capabilities to it.

Note: Anyone curious to know more about the Remedy project at UNT may explore the www.unt.edu/remedy Website, which provides information to system users and contains the documentation of the project. The Steering Committee Website is at www.cascss.unt.edu/calltrax.