Open Source Tools Part II - Bugzilla

This post will discuss our usage of Bugzilla for our issue/ticket tracking. Bugzilla was originally created to track software defects, but we have found that it is also very useful for tracking trouble tickets for our external support organization. We did have to make some modifications for it to fit our model, but it definitely works well for us. It has a great search capability, and reporting is straightforward and fairly robust.

It relies on a MySQL database to store the ticket information. It has security features that allow us to segregate our customers so they can only see the tickets that they report, and we can have different application sets for each client to ease assignments.

When we started using it a few years ago, there were not a lot of F/OSS tools that we found for issue tracking as there are today. We have considered moving to a program better suited for application support, as our upgrade path can be challenging due to some of our customizations, but for now we are happy with our system.