Unidata Support

Tom Yoksas
September 11, 2005

As reported in the April Usercomm/Polcomm status report, the UPC has been investigating ways to streamline its User Support process. As a reminder, the overall object of the investigation is to implement a new system that:

• simplifies and speeds the support process for all UPC staff
• provides facilities where end users can more easily help themselves
• provides a rich set of functions through which support performance can be monitored
• can be extended to provide additional functionality deemed important by UPC personnel
• integrates with the new version of the Unidata web site

Our approach was to identify existing support systems that, at a minimum, offer features contained in our existing inquiry tracking system and provide key features or facilities to implement key features that were deemed mandatory in a new system including the ability for the end user to open, modify and close their own inquiry, and comment on support that they have received.

Eight helpdesk packages were reviewed for features, extensibility, and cost effectiveness. Two of the packages reviewed were brought in-house for testing:

Request Tracker
eSupport

Even though the Request Tracker (RT) appeared to be the easiest for us to extend, we decided to implement use eSupport since it appeared to contain virtually all of the features that we consider to be mandatory in a support system.

At the time of the spring Policy Committee meeting, eSupport was undergoing active development at Kayako Web Solutions, Ltd. The promise of the features advertised for the new eSupport release, v3, and the perception of its impending release convinced us that we should directly implement v3 instead of v2 and then upgrade (developers' estimates for availability for v3 were early to mid-June). Coupled with staff's focus on the 2005 series of training workshops, Kayako's release of v3 in late July put us two months behind our target implementation of eSupport. Moreover, eSupport v3 continues to rapid evolution as long term eSupport users report bugs and request feature enhancements. Given this situation, the decision was made to not begin using eSupport in the Unidata Version 2 web rollout. Instead, we have been experimenting with eSupport v3 configurations on our web development machine.

We are planning to introduce eSupport to the community in a test mode in October. During the test period, we will be soliciting community input on features, ease of use, and performance. We will inform the community of the availability of the new support facilities through our usual channels: community email list announcements and the monthly electronic Newsletter.

Unidata Support Metrics

Above are histograms that portray the number of Unidata email responses for categories of support for a one year period ending September 12, 2005. The histograms are arranged by yearly activity averages with the highest on the left and lowest on the right. Each quarter year within the period is depicted from oldest to newest from left to right. The number of responses has been normalized to weekly averages so that the support load over the various periods can be easily compared.

Total support averaged 150 responses/week over the entire year; 157 for the first quarter; 136 for the second quarter; 150 for the third quarter; and 158 for the current quarter.

Individual support activities included in the categories depicted above are listed in the following table.

Category	Packages, Groups, and Lists
ldm	ldm, ldm-users-list
idd	gozer, idd, idd-antarctic idd-brazil, idd-caribe, idd-inject, idd-status, suominet, venezuela
data	casestudies, casestudies-list, conduit, c2-linda, craft, level2-linda, craft-nws, craft-ty, datastream, difax, level2, level2-ty, noaaport, noaaport-ty
netcdf	data-models, netcdf, netcdfgroup-list, netcdf-hdf-list, netcdf-java, netcdf-perl
gempak	gempak, gembud-list
mcidas	mcdevelop, mcidas, mcidas-list
dods	dods, dods-core, dods-list, dods-tech
nws-changes	nws-changes
outreach	agu-linda, ams-linda, announce, barbados-ty, cbmet-ty, chile-ty, egrants, egy-linda, external, iai-ty, noaa-linda, nws-linda, meteoforum-ty, unidata, workshop
idv	idv, idvlist, idvsteering, metapps, visad-list
utilities	decoders, ldm-mcidas, udunits
miscellaneous	misc, license, network, notrack, platforms, wxp, wxp-list
thredds	java-dev, thredds
lead	lead

Comments

• The LEAD numbers are a major underestimate of its activity since very few LEAD email transactions go through User Support.
• Support numbers for individual packages, groups, and lists can be seen in full support statistics.

Some tentative conclusions

• The total support provided by the UPC remains high. Overall support activities are for the most part seasonally invariant.
• Support required for the legacy visualization packages GEMPAK and McIDAS continues to be substantial with GEMPAK leading the way as the most widely distributed analysis application. The IDV support load continues to grow as more users adopt the package.
• Support required for LDM, IDD, and data continues at a high level and shows some variability throughout the year.
• Support for netCDF remains substantial, but is modest given the number of users of the package worldwide.
• The overall higher numbers for outreach reflect inclusion of more categories of support/outreach provided by Linda.
• Taken as a whole, the support required for visualization packages (GEMPAK, IDV, and McIDAS) is comparable to the support related to data reception (LDM, IDD, noaaport).
• Support for any package increases after a new version of the package is made available.

NOTE

These numbers and conclusions should not be taken too literally, for several reasons:

• For some packages, multiple responses in the same thread may be bundled into a single archived email. Other packages have each response in a thread counted separately.
• After a new release of software, there may be a flurry of the same or similar questions, which can be answered in separate emails or in a single mailing list posting.
• The graph primarily represents support of end users and site administrators, not developers. Support for non-Unidata developers in projects such as OPeNDAP/DODS, THREDDS, IDV, GEMPAK, and McIDAS requires significant resources, but is difficult to assess.
• Not all support records were indexable for this report. Given this, the above numbers are an underestimate of the actual support being provided by the UPC.

by Tom Yoksas