Helpdesk Software

You sure your elastic search service is running properly?

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Just installed zammad today as well. Liking it so far. Much better interface and much more simplified than osticket.

You see? That’s something I should be warned. Something is wrong:

81 failing background jobs
Failed to run background job #1 'BackgroundJobSearchIndex' 10 time(s) with 78 attempt(s).

Everything looks good now. Not sure why Elastic was shut down.

Thanks Virmach for the SSD32G!

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Decided to scrap Zammad. Was using a ton of resources and seemed very clunky to install and customize.

Installed Faveo instead and so far it seems pretty awesome. Uses minimal resources (Laravel PHP + MySQL) and is pretty much set up to get moving right out of the box. Just gotta set up SSL and tweak a few settings and I think it’ll work out a hell of a lot better than Zammad or some of the other ones. WebUI has a lot going on (lots of buttons, menus, options, etc.), but still is pretty slick and easy to navigate. Community edition can be self-hosted with no cost.

Thanks for the recommendation, @Michael!

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Very welcome! It has its quirks, but I’m still using it. It’s updated quite regularly. So far so good! Glad I could help :slight_smile:

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Zammad is a resources hog, no doubt about that.
I’ll check Faveo. Are you using it on production?

by the way…

  • Application server: Apache, Nginx. Make sure pretty url or search engine friendly url are enabled in the web server

How? :smiley:

Edit: This being Hostballs, I think it’s worth mentioning that Faveo have a WHMCS plugin. not sure how many of you would ie a replacement for WHMCS built in helpdesk… anyhow… I wanted to point out that @Mason failed to mention that. So I win… ok…? I win!

Edit 2: @Mason, I can’t find the hardware requirements. You running that on what?

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I wouldn’t call my personal stuff “production”, but it will be public facing and used by people, yes.

They have great install guides on their site. I followed the Debian 9 + Nginx setup guide here:
https://support.faveohelpdesk.com/show/faveo-helpdesk-installation-on-debian-9-with-nginx-on-php-71

The pretty url stuff is either in the faveo conf file (if using nginx) or in .htaccess (if using apache), both provided.

That’s really cool! Something to keep in mind for the future :slight_smile:

I’m using a LXC Debian 9 container. 1 CPU and 512mb RAM. Very minimal. And everything runs flawlessly

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512MB ram?! wtf…
…one thing I’m not a fan of Faveo is that its team its all over the place… they have a web agency bizz, they sell on scripts markets…
…there’s no “separation” of the “waters” (brand wise) and that makes me me unease. Can’t really explain why…

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Lol yeah, was expecting to run into resource issues, but haven’t had the need to increase resources at all. We’ll see, though, once people start using it and all.

That kind of stuff doesn’t bother me, speaking as a hobbyist. As a business owner I might have a different opinion. Seeing as it’s open source and has a free community license, that’s all I need :slight_smile:

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I kinda feel bad for saying it cause there’s a free, community version.
Is that their “organization” speaks to their mindstate in regards to their projects, to me it feels like they just mix it all together and run ahead with it, which makes me feel like they don’t plan. And no plan, makes me unease.

On the other hand, complainign about a free version is kind of a douche move… so yeah… feeling kinda bad for posting this… :frowning:

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Side note: Mono isn’t as relevant any more now that .NET Core is available and supports Linux and MacOS natively :slight_smile: .NET documentation | Microsoft Learn

This thread reminded me that a long time ago, I was writing a ticketing system since I didn’t like any of the others available at the time (OTRS and osTicket were the main ones).

I checked and that was way back in 2005. Wow. I recently imported the Sourceforge CVS repo into my Github so now I can be reminded of my old terrible code forever :stuck_out_tongue: https://github.com/Daniel15/DanPHPSupport/tree/master/DanPHPSupport (don’t bother trying that code, it’s not PHP 5 compatible, and definitely not PHP 7 compatible).

Anyways, interesting to see that 14 years later, there’s still many choices each with their own flaws. At least it looks like there’s a decent choice now (Faveo)

Plain-ish PHP sites don’t need a lot of RAM. You could easily run a few dozen sites in 512 MB RAM, if they’re small. The issue you’re likely to hit first is that if MySQL, PHP and a web server (eg. Nginx) are running in the same container, MySQL may start swapping once it hits the RAM limit. You do not want your SQL server to swap, as it will absolutely kill perf. If you do want to use containers like LXC/Docker, my first suggestion if you start hitting memory limits would be to move MySQL into its own container and dedicate some RAM to it specifically.

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@Mason

I have to install zammad for production.
Thinking on following this;

How is the Faveo going?

I downloaded their community version and didnt’ get around to install it, but since they have called me and emailed me several times.
Pretty sure its all about upsell.

How is your experience with them?

Tip #1: don’t do it.

Jk. But seriously, just quickly glancing at the complexity involved in that guide… why does installing a simple ticket system need to be so involved? Zammad is terribly overengineered and is designed to solve problems it likely would never face.

Haven’t done much with it besides setting it up. Planning on using it in action within the next week or two, so I’ll definitely update you on how it goes :slight_smile: Not anticipating any curveballs since it was so easy to set up, but we’ll see :stuck_out_tongue:

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One of my Centmin Mod users was asking about help configuring open source helpdesk software called Freescout https://community.centminmod.com/threads/how-to-install-freescout-on-centminmod.16466/

looks pretty good GitHub - freescout-helpdesk/freescout: FreeScout — Free self-hosted help desk & shared mailbox (Zendesk / Help Scout alternative)

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If found as a lifetime deal or at a discount, liveagent, is a great helpdesk and livechat tool.

Forgot to provide an update for this so here it goes. I’ve been using a Faveo instance for the past several months for my free KVM project. It has needed next to no maintenance since initially setting it up back in the beginning of this year. I’ve gotten quite comfortable with it and haven’t run into any errors during normal operation. Email and email templates work, reply to ticket via email works flawlessly, create new ticket via email works, it’s a piece of cake to create new users, in general it’s pretty intuitive and simple to use.

I only have two gripes and these are just nitpicking some nice-to-have, but missing features:

  1. Would be nice if there was a way to open the same ticket among multiple users (i.e. create new tickets, 1 per user, with the same content). Would make monthly renewal tickets easier to handle so I wouldn’t have to create them all manually.
  2. Would be nice if you could create a ticket for a user as the support agent. As it handles it now, when you create a new ticket for a user as the support agent, it makes it seem like the ticket was initially created by that user (i.e. their picture and username is next to the ticket content you just wrote). The email still gets sent out, so it doesn’t cause too much confusion, but just seems a bit strange.

Maybe they’ve worked on the above pain points in a recent update. I haven’t touched the install since January, so not too sure. Anyways, it’s a great, easy-to-use, and free support system that I’d highly recommend to anyone. And it uses minimal resources (compared to something like Zammad).

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Neither would your wife. (/5mo snype)

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I use it in my small business still and haven’t found anything that’s show stopping. It has its niggles and is well worth updating (I had an issue where it would crash with a ticket, but the update fixed it).

There doesn’t appear to be a very active community, but I’d be surprised if the first niggle isn’t doable

Glad you like it :slight_smile:

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It’s still in the staging phase, alright!? Some of us have longer deployment timelines than others… or at least that’s what I keep telling myself

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