How to set Dynamic Fields Management

In this article you will learn how to set Dynamic Fields in your OTRS, Znuny or OTOBO instance via a Generic Agent.For this tutorial we assume a IT Desktop Services company. This company needs to track the assets like Laptop, PC, Printer, Displays and Dockingstations. First let us define a few dynamic fields Go to […]

Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from Znuny 6.4 to Znuny 6.5

In this article you will find tools and paths how to ensure a clean migration from Znuny 6.4 to Znuny 6.5 under Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04. How to get started? In the article Prepare / start a upgrade / migration of OTRS / Znuny all steps are explained.Read and execute them carefully to avoid data or […]

Allow non-Admins to access Templates in OTRS / Znuny

The template mechanism in Znuny / OTRS and OTOBO is very helpful to automate regular responses. Your knowledge prerequisites to this article Recommended roles and groups As described before, we recommend following. Roles Groups Allowing Templates to be accessible to non-admins The configuration system is separated into basically to parts. For the following steps In […]

Allow non-Admins access Admin-menu in OTRS / Znuny / OTOBO

To be able to provide Power-Users or Admins also accesses to the Admin section, you have to enable the permissions to it. But sadly as a default, only the admin group is allowed to modify it. Here you will learn how to configure it, to be accessible to other users too. Your knowledge prerequisites to […]

Howto Fix Error: Too many connections on Znuny, OTRS, OTOBO

You are regularly facing an the following error on your Znuny, OTRS or OTOBO installation? This is a typical case, there power users are having many tabs open, or open massively many tabs with tickets. Each tab is causing a connection to a database, since the connection sharing is somehow not optimally solved on the […]

Disable quoting of E-Mails on composing replies in Znuny, OTRS, OTOBO

You have the issue, that your agents are not cleanly reading the full e-mail on reply and sensitive data is getting therefore send by your company to arbitrary persons?You want to ensure that only the message entered by the current agent is getting sent and that this agent has selectively choose what to send out? […]

Fix Znuny, OTRS OTOBO error: Email already fetched by another process

You are getting one of these errors in Znuny, OTRS or OTOBO and you do not know how to fix it? Sending of this message has failed … Can’t connect to … ! or Email account fetch already fetched by another process. Please try again later! Try on Znuny Admin page to fix hfgd Analyze […]

Configure list size in Dynamic Fields Management

In this article you will learn how to configure your OTRS, Znuny or OTOBO instance to define a list and page size for to view all Dynamic Fields. Read on to learn more Configure List Sizes or overview pages and list view pages Dynamic Fields Management On Dynamic Fields Management list view the defaults are […]

Generic Agent vs Postmaster Filter in Znuny & OTRS

You get deeper into the automation of Znuny, OTRS or OTOBO and you will identify at a point in time that there are two features to automate your tasks. First you have to understand at what situation are the both features working. The features are: The often recommended Postmaster Filter – why is it a […]

Best practices for naming Transition Actions in Znuny, OTOBO, OTRS

In this article you will learn the best practices on naming conventions for Transition Actions on Process Management processes in Znuny, OTOBO and OTRS. Transition Action Name Here you define the name under which you will later find your transition actions. This is really helpful to you and your team mates to have a standard […]

Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from Znuny 6.3 to Znuny 6.4

In this article you will find tools and paths how to ensure a clean migration from Znuny 6.3 to Znuny 6.4 under Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04. How to get started? In the article Prepare / start a upgrade / migration of OTRS / Znuny all steps are explained.Read and execute them carefully to avoid data or […]

Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from Znuny 6.2 to Znuny 6.3

The original documentation to upgrade Znuny 6.2 to latest 6.3 is focused on many different Linux distributions. Here we focus on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and also with 22.04 LTS In this article you will find tools and paths how to ensure a clean migration from Znuny 6.2 to Znuny 6.3 under Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04. […]

Ticket Linking Types Normal, Parent in Znuny & OTRS

Learn in this article what the link types of OTRS / Znuny / OTOBO define and are used to. The link types are: Normal Child Parent Sometimes you require multiple tickets to solve a common Incident / Case / Issue of your client. For this case it is helpful to have these tickets interlinked in […]

Error: command ‘MailAccountFetch’ is failed

After upgrading to Znuny 6.3 you get new tickets with the subject OTRS Scheduler Daemon Cron: MailAccountFetch and the body Console command ‘MailAccountFetch’ is failed. Cause of the issue It is a bug (re-)introduced with Znuny 6.3 version. It is a bug which will probably never fixed in Znuny 6.3, since it is a intermediate […]

Questionnaire for Migration Support Request

A migration / upgrade is highly depending on your existing installation. So there are a bunch of questions which need to be clarified. This are: what operating system do you use? what software/package versions do you use? your installation size of the ticket system? your backend of the ticket system? existing integrations Please provide us […]

Change Ticket title in Process Management with Znuny & OTRS

This article explains how to change a title of the ticket to make it easier for your agents to search for standard process tickets in Znuny / OTRS / OTOBO Process Management processes. Change Ticket title in a process It is sometimes helpful to change the title of a ticket with some values from data […]

Change URL / FQDN / address of OTRS / Znuny

Learn in this article how to change the browser link of your OTRS / Znuny installation. The link is also named as URL web address FQDN (full qualified domain name) DNS For this tutorial we will assume your OTRS / Znuny is reachable under https://otrs.example.com and we want to change it to https://servicedesk.example.com Prepare your […]

How to automatically export CMDB from Znuny?

You are using Znuny with Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) as a data store for hardware and software and you want to export this data for reuse? Export CMDB Depending on your OS and installation way of OTRS/Znuny there are different ways. Ubuntu and Debian based Znuny installs for deb package and for debian based source […]

Znuny / OTRS Jq not Installed on CheckModules.pl

You are getting the error that Jq is not installed on running Znuny / OTRS /bin/otrs.CheckModules.pl –all and you get the error Jq………………………….Not installed! Jq is at least required for creating processes for process automation / process management in Znuny. So it is recommended that you install it to avoid later issues, even if you […]

Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from Znuny 6.1 to Znuny 6.2

The original documentation to upgrade Znuny 6.1 to latest 6.2 is focused on many different Linux distributions. Here we focus on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (shall work also with 22.04 LTS). If you are a administrator of OTRS/Znuny and mostly maintaining the (web-)servers based on Linux or like recommended from our side on Ubuntu, you may […]

Prepare / start a upgrade / migration of OTRS / Znuny

How to get started? The best way to start with an upgrade, a change or a migration from OTRS to Znuny is to have a clone or a new instance of your current environment, there you can run the migration tests before doing on production. You are on VMware, proxmox, Hyper-V or other virtualized environments? […]

Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from Znuny 6.0 to Znuny 6.1

The original documentation to upgrade Znuny 6.0 to latest 6.1 is focused on many different Linux distributions. Here we focus on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (shall work also with 22.04 LTS). If you are a administrator of OTRS/Znuny and mostly maintaining the (web-)servers based on Linux or like recommended from our side on Ubuntu, you may […]

OTRS & Znuny Support

If you are looking for a ticketing system expert that can handle all of your service desk needs, Znuny (formerly OTRS community edition) is the perfect option. Znuny is easy to use and can be customized to meet your specific requirements. Choosing Znuny will give you a system that is reliable and scalable. Due to […]

Current OTRS open source status?

In 2003, a German company called OpenSource Consulting (OSC) released a software package called OTRS. OTRS was designed to be a trouble ticketing system for customer support, similar to systems used by large companies such as Microsoft or Amazon. However, in early 2018, there have been rumors about discontinuing OTRS as open source. The reason […]

OTRS free community edition discontinued what now?

In 2009, the company behind the OTRS free edition announced to go public as a share company OTRS AG. There was a lot of rumors that the free edition would be discontinued. Luckily it did not happen. However, its popularity meant that it continued to be developed and maintained by a community of volunteers. The […]

Understand Znuny / OTRS / OTOBO traceback

Learn in this article how to analyze, debug and fully understand OTRS / Znuny traceback errors. Let us take a common upgrade issue from Znuny 6.2.x to 6.3.xHere we are failing on fetching E-Mails and we get this error: ERROR: OTRS-otrs.Console.pl-Maint::PostMaster::MailAccountFetch-10 Perl Message: There was an error executing Execute() in Kernel::System::Console::Command::Maint::PostMaster::MailAccountFetch: Console command ‘MailAccountFetch’ is […]

How to remove lock of closed tickets in Znuny / OTRS

On closing tickets the last lock state is being kept on the ticket. E.g. an agent has worked on the ticket after finishing his work, he simply closed the ticket. This process so far is good. Sadly it is not so good, if the ticket gets an reply to a later time there, the previous […]

Allow users to Bulk Edit locked tickets of other agents OTRS / Znuny

Depending on the process you live in your team it maybe required to allow users to bulk edit tickets, even if they are not having the lock or not being the owner of the found tickets.Be careful on this setting!Since the ticket system is ensuring, that no concurrent operations are executed without having the lock […]

Allow users to Move locked tickets of other agents OTRS / Znuny

Depending on the process you live in your team it maybe required to allow users to move tickets between queues, even if they are not having the lock or not being the owner of the ticket.Be careful on this setting!Since the ticket system is ensuring, that no concurrent operations are executed without having the lock […]

Allow users to close locked tickets of other agents OTRS / Znuny

Depending on the process you live in your team it maybe required to allow users to close tickets, even if they are not having the lock or not being the owner of the ticket.Be careful on this setting!Since the ticket system is ensuring, that no concurrent operations are executed without having the lock on the […]

Mark replied tickets in Znuny/OTRS

You want to highlight replied tickets from clients to identify easily between open and replied tickets? E.g. you have a different policy/SLA for open tickets vs new tickets in terms of response or solution times. Create new replied status First we need to create a new status clientReplied go to Admin > StateManagement or via […]

How to allow users to reply on locked tickets of other agents

Depending on the process you live in your team it maybe required to allow users to reply on tickets, even if they are not having the lock or not being the owner of the ticket.Be careful on this setting!Since the ticket system is ensuring, that no concurrent changes are done without having the requirement to […]

Fix OTRS / Znuny error: Active indexing process already running!

In rare conditions it may happen that the scheduler daemon of OTRS / Znuny may run into following issue and you get tons of tickets generated by the scheduler. Subject: OTRS Scheduler Daemon Cron: ArticleSearchIndexRebuild Body: Error: Active indexing process already running! Skipping… This maybe caused by triggering the ArticleSearchIndexRebuild manually like described in OTRS […]

OTRS / Znuny search tuning with rebuilding ArticleSearchIndex

OTRS and Znuny use sadly a custom index for optimizing search. Sadly, because since many years there a good out of the box solutions, which make fast and reliable search optimizations (e.g. elasticsearch). Hopefully Znuny will clean up this in the near future. But does not help to complain let us go through how to […]

Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from OTRS 5 to OTRS/Znuny 6

Sadly the documentation of upgrading OTRS 5 to OTRS/Znuny 6 is not that quality that it is obviously and easy to handle. This HowTo is built on top of many issues faced on upgrading from OTRS 5 to Znuny 6. OTRS 6 and Znuny 6 are equivalent, since Znuny 6 is exactly OTRS 6, despite […]

Is the OTRS/Znuny DBUpdate-to-X.pl script idempotent/re-run-able?

In our case we have seldom the luck, that the upgrade of OTRS / Znuny is working like charm and runs of first execution.We are using OTRS / Znuny since version 1.0 and we have never had a clean upgrade! Before going on, lets clarify idempotent. This means you can re-run multiple times a function, […]

How to fix OTRS/Znuny upgrade error character_set_database utf8

During an upgrade on OTRS 5 and Znuny 6 and above you may get the following error. sudo -u otrs scripts/DBUpdate-to-6.pl Migration started … Checking requirements … Requirement check for: Check framework version … Requirement check for: Check required Perl version … Requirement check for: Check required database version … Requirement check for: Check database […]

How to fix apache coredumps in OTRS / Znuny

In this article you find a solution for Apache coredumps with OTRS or Znuny. The common coredump issue You get regularly Internal Server Errors like this during you are writing or sending new tickets, adding new notes or simply linking or merging tickets? And in this moment you see in your /var/apache/error_log messages like this? […]

How to fix unsafe ownership .gnupg in OTRS / Znuny

In this article you will learn how to fix a common issue with gnupg gpg/pgp integration in OTRS in Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.The log (error) message is typically: gpg: WARNING: unsafe ownership on homedir ‘/opt/otrs/.gnupg’ The issue is your folders permission of /opt/otrs/.gnupg and could be fixed with chown -R www-data.www-data /opt/otrs/.gnupg find /opt/otrs/.gnupg -type […]

OTRS / Znuny on Ubuntu with nginx

This article describes how to configure OTRS in conjunction with nginx only. This article content was tested with all Ubuntu versions 14.04, 12.04 and 10.04. First install the required packages apt-get install nginx fcgiwrap Now edit your /etc/init.d/fcgiwrap to ensure that user and group are set to www-data. Also switch to the more efficient socket […]

Upgrade / migrate any OTRS to latest Znuny

OTRS, Znuny and OTOBO have a clean upgrade path. The page is pretty straight forward. All upgrades need to be executed after another. Means how can you upgrade the versions 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4, 5, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 and 6.4 How to upgrade / migrate […]

Error ‘Email too big’ on OTRS / Znuny e-mail fetching

If you face this error on OTRS / Znuny, you have very probably a missconfigured mail fetching configuration. You may face errors like: IMAPS: Can’t fetch email x from xxxx@xxxxx.xxx/xxx.xxxxx.xxx. Email too big (41234 KB – max 25600 KB) or POPS: Can’t fetch email x from xxxx@xxxxx.xxx/xxx.xxxxx.xxx. Email too big (41234 KB – max 25600 […]

Add custom & personal footer with logo in OTRS / Znuny?

In OTRS you can define so called Signatures to add a custom footer. The footer can contain: Logo Images HTML Links In this article you will learn how to configure your OTRS / Znuny for this. Configure the personalized Signature first before we can use a signature / footer, we need to define it first […]

How to migrate OTRS / Znuny from centOS to Ubuntu

In this article you will find all steps how to migrate OTRS/Znuny from centOS to Ubuntu. Since the package maintenance of OTRS/Znuny of the debian package is not very good (experience from Ubunut 6.06 LTS up to 16.04 LTS), here you will find the description how to use the tar.gz package of OTRS/Znuny with mariaDB. […]

Set default ‘Next ticket state’ on reply or Send

In this article you will learn how to configure your OTRS, Znuny or OTOBO instance for your default Next ticket state. It depends from which screen or operation you come from and thus the configuration is not very clean and clear. Read on to learn more Screens for answer, forwarding and sending new tickets In […]

How to manually Change Ticket title in Znuny & OTRS

Sometimes it is required to change the ticket title to something more meaningful. This is possible from the Znuny / OTRS / OTOBO UI. But the location is really not intuitive to find. Change Ticket title manually On the top level menu of your ticket you will find the section Miscellaneousand underneathFree Fields Now you […]

Configure max fetching size of e-mails in OTRS / Znuny / OTOBO

In Znuny / OTRS / OTOBO there are some good defaults defined. E.g. for fetching e-mails a typical default of 16MB is defined. This could be in some cases far too low. You want now to change the maximum size of the e-mails in OTRS / Znuny / OTOBO? You are unsure if the e-mail […]

How to debug e-mail errors in OTRS / Znuny?

You face the issue, that e-mails are missing in OTRS. There could be multiple issues behind it. You want to understand how you can debug or trace the root cause of missing e-mails? Trace and debug e-mail issues in OTRS First of all you should recheck if you have made changes to your mail account […]

Allow non-Admins access to Generic Agent OTRS / Znuny?

The generic agent is a nice feature of OTRS to automate ticket handling. But sadly as a default only the admin group is allowed to modify it. Here you will learn how to configure it to be accessible to other users. Your knowledge prerequisites to this article Allowing Generic Agent to be accessible to non-admins […]

How to configure gpg/pgp encrypted communication for OTRS / Znuny?

Learn how to configure your OTRS to encrypt and decrypt GPG messages easily for your agents. Basically you have two steps, the preparation on your operating system of OTRS, and to be specific in the user context of the running otrs. The usercontext is typically the user otrs (default on all debian, ubuntu also for […]

Trademark Acknowledgement Statements

Wherever the following trademarks appear on this site, We acknowledges the following trademarks: PRINCE2® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved. PRINCE2 Agile® is a registered trade mark of AXELOS Limited, used under permission of AXELOS Limited. All rights reserved. ITIL® is a registered trade […]

Is OTRS ITIL certified and compliant?

OTRS is a IT service management tool and thus it comes up very quickly that bigger companies as for compliance to some standards. One of the common service management standards is ITIL. We have to separate OTRS commercial and OTRS community edition. Is OTRS commercial version ITIL compliant? Yes it is but as in all […]

Available OTRS / Znuny variables for automation

OTRS provides a bunch of variables for automation and for generation of notes, e-mails, event notification and messages. Which variables are available are sadly bad documented on Znuny/OTRS page itself. Thus we have collected all (for us) known variables in this article. All prefixes for variables Variable prefixes <OTRS_AGENT_*><OTRS_APPOINTMENT_*><OTRS_CALENDAR_*><OTRS_COMMENT><OTRS_CONFIG_*><OTRS_CURRENT_*><OTRS_CUSTOMER_*><OTRS_EMAIL_*><OTRS_FAQ_*><OTRS_MERGE_TO_TICKET><OTRS_NEWPW><OTRS_NOTIFICATION_RECIPIENT_*><OTRS_OWNER_*><OTRS_QUEUE><OTRS_REDIRECT_TO><OTRS_RESPONSIBLE_*><OTRS_TICKET_*><OTRS_TOKEN> Variables for current agent details This […]

How to set max amount on search result page in OTRS / Znuny?

In OTRS you can use some defaults to see results of ticket searches. These amount of results is configurable with the gear icon on the top left corner of the search result area. Here you have the defaults of 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35. This is okay for most cases but sometimes you need […]

How to configure SMTP / Mail sending with OTRS / Znuny?

You need to configure OTRS to access a SMTP (sending mail server). This configuration is mandatory to be able to send and reply to client e-mails/tickets. Now you need to configure OTRS for the first time or you want to change the default behaviour for SMTP? You want to configure the host, username and password […]

How to configure E-Mail polling (pop3) in OTRS / Znuny?

You want to use OTRS to poll new tickets via POP3 from your mailserver. Why is it recommended to use POP3?With POP3, OTRS will delete the e-mails once they are properly retrieved as tickets. So you have only E-Mails in the mailbox, which are not processed. The alternative is to use IMAP to retrive e-mails, […]

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