Setup an ESI OSticket department to offload many of the questions from #esi slack channel

joachimweyl commented 3 months ago

Motivation

There are a few reasons that it would be best to handle the majority of our ESI question via OSTicket instead of slack.

All discussions pertaining to the issue stay in one place, not spread out over multiple days of slack responses
Better tracking of reoccurring issues, and therefore more targeted documentation
Often the act of adding enough detail to a ticket will allow the user to answer their own question or at least provide a well thought out question
Better tracking of individual issues, an open ticket means we know something still needs to be responded to

Completion Criteria

Ability for ESI users to ask questions in a ticketing system. @tzumainn & @naved001 have access to responding to questions in ticketing system.

Description

[x] Ask @Milstein to create an OSTicket for ESI
[ ] Work with Milson to flesh out ESI for OSticket
- [ ] Get SMTP client secret from @hakasapl
[ ] Add @naved001, @tzumainn & @joachimweyl to OSTicket for ESI
[x] Create wording for the #esi slack channel description
[ ] pass wording by @naved001 & @tzumainn
[ ] Update slack channel description
[ ] Use same or similar wording as a post to the Slack channel as well
[ ] Pin post
[ ] Update documentation Contact Us to include OSTicket link

Completion dates

Desired - 2024-07-10 Required - TBD

joachimweyl commented 3 months ago

Channel Description Opening

ESI is a hardware isolation project built on top of OpenStack that allows multiple bare metal node owners to collaborate to form a single bare metal cloud. Owners have exclusive use of their nodes, and can also lease their nodes out to lessees.

Channel Description Ticketing Wording

Documentation describing the use of ESI can be found here. Please feel free to ask questions regarding ESI, but if the question is complex or the ESI developers are busy, we may ask you to create an issue for tracking purposes.

joachimweyl commented 3 months ago

@Milstein what will be involved in creating an ESI section in the OSTicket that you have setup?

joachimweyl commented 3 months ago

@naved001 & @tzumainn please review the wording we would use for the description of the slack channel and the second half as a post to the slack channel once the OSTicket for ESI is setup. You can find the wording above in a comment here.

tzumainn commented 3 months ago

So, I think I'd prefer something that feels less like a wall and feels more like an open source community - something like "Please feel free to ask questions regarding ESI, but if the question is complex or the ESI developers are busy, we may ask you to create an issue for tracking purposes."

I have a few reasons for this:

a lot of the questions end with me simply pointing out a particular part of the documentation that may have been missed
I know a bunch of ESI users have never used OpenStack before, and are a bit intimidated at downloading all the software and clients; if you look at the currently assigned nodes and projects, there are more than a few that have simply remained untouched. I think a direct connection is encouraging to users like that, and the effort of creating an issue just increases the likelihood that they'll turn away
I agree that we should be tracking work that we're doing, but if that work amounts to linking documentation or reassuring people that they're using ESI correctly - I don't think that's worth tracking

I know there are specific cases that people were thinking of that prompted this discussion, and I 100% agree that those cases deserved the creation of an issue and a formalized communication process. But I've also dealt with a lot of users who were much easier to deal with, and I don't want them to feel unwelcome.

joachimweyl commented 3 months ago

Updated wording to incorporate this change.

joachimweyl commented 3 months ago

@Milstein what server are the other email addresses on OSTicket using? Can we use the same system that they are using?

Milstein commented 3 months ago

@joachimweyl: They are set up by Jim for individual ticket email addresses such as help@nerc.mghpcc.org and help@nese.mghpcc.org, which require "Incoming Mailbox setup" with OAuth settings (we don't have visibility of Unique Client Secret)

joachimweyl commented 3 weeks ago

It is blocked awaiting Jim's response.

CCI-MOC / esi