Open Science Grid (OSG) Ticket Synchronization: Keeping Your Home Field Advantage In A Distributed Environment

Abstract

Large distributed computing collaborations, such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), face many issues when it comes to providing a working grid environment for their users. One of these is exchanging tickets between various ticketing systems in use by grid collaborations. Ticket systems such as Footprints, RT, Remedy, and ServiceNow all have different schema that must be addressed in order to provide a reliable exchange of information between support entities and users in different grid environments. To combat this problem, OSG Operations has created a ticket synchronization interface called GOC-TX that relies on web services instead of error-prone email parsing methods of the past. Synchronizing tickets between different ticketing systems allows any user or support entity to work on a ticket in their home environment, thus providing a familiar and comfortable place to provide updates without having to learn another ticketing system. The interface is built in a way that it is generic enough that it can be customized for nearly any ticketing system with a web-service interface with only minor changes. This allows us to be flexible and rapidly bring new ticket synchronization online. Synchronization can be triggered by different methods including mail, web services interface, and active messaging. GOC-TX currently interfaces with Global Grid User Support (GGUS) for WLCG, Remedy at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL), and Request Tracker (RT) at the Virtual Data Toolkit (VDT). Work is progressing on the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) ServiceNow synchronization. This paper will explain the problems faced by OSG and how they led OSG to create and implement this ticket synchronization system along with the technical details that allow synchronization to be preformed at a production level.