Client-server architecture

Much faster and more efficient than web-based ticketing systems, and it allows users to work efficiently both from the office and while telecommuting over lower bandwidth connections.

High performance and scalability

Abacus has benchmarked at over 100,000 new tickets a day on a single $2000 server, and is in production use at sites that handle tens of thousands of tickets a day with dozens of users.

If you need to scale performance as you grow then Abacus can be configured to spread load across multiple servers.

Sophisticated routing

Incoming tickets can be prioritized, forwarded, routed to specific abacus users via a powerful routing language.

Incident aggregation

Incoming complaints are grouped according to the issue of the complaint, based on rules you define. Master incidents can be created automatically as tickets arrive, or created manually.

Hostname and IP address highlighting for easy triage

URLs, hostnames and IP addresses associated with your customers are clearly highlighted, making it easy to scan complaints and quickly identify what about the complaint is relevant to your network.

Customer data

Abacus can import your customer information from your customer database, and automatically assign incoming tickets to customers and provide one-click access to customer contact information.

Customer history

All interactions with a customer and all reports about them are recorded in Abacus. The history of a particular customer can be reviewed, and problematic customers readily identified.

Powerful search engine

A full-text search engine allows fast searches of all tickets using either a GUI query designer or a full text search language similar to Google or Altavista. As well as searching the text of tickets you can also search based on ticket urgency, the customer a ticket is assigned to, ticket age and all the other metadata associated with the ticket, including any custom fields you create. You can even search for a range of IP addresses and find any tickets that contain a hostname or email address that resolved to an IP address in that range when the report was originally received.

Search results are saved for easy future retrieval. They can be turned into a master incident, and future tickets that arrive that would have matched the search will be automatically assigned to that master incident.

If you need to provide information for your legal department or law enforcement the results of a search can be easily exported to text files.

One click command execution

Hovering over or clicking on any highlighted hostname or IP address in a ticket displays information about that element, showing it's connection to your network.

A configurable context menu allows one click access to a range of tools such as search, traceroute, whois or a web browser. Any tool you have that will run from the unix commandline can be easily integrated, allowing you to use existing scripts with a minimum of effort.

Powerful reporting

Abacus stores all ticket information and metadata in an easy to use format in it's embedded postgresql database. The included BIRT reporting engine allows you to design reports with tables and charts using a GUI designer. You can then run those reports as needed, or schedule them to be run on a regular basis, making them available as HTML or PDF via the built-in webserver, or mailed out to a mailing list each morning.

If you have an existing reporting solution you prefer, such as crystal reports, then the ODBC and JDBC interfaces to the database make using that just as easy.

Customization

The entire abacus client user interface can be modified, using a simple GUI editor. The layout can be rearranged and unneeded features removed. If you need an additional metadata field associated with each ticket or master incident to support your existing workflow you can add text fields, pull-down menus or buttons to support that. Those new fields will be immediately accesable from all the abacus clients, the search engine and the reporting engine.

The abacus client includes a full javascript engine and development environment for adding functionality and automation, including scripting, tool integration, dialog boxes and web services access.

The abacus routing engine allows additional rules and actions to be added via an embedded perl engine, so if you need to annotate or route tickets using data from an enterprise database or LDAP server it is easy to craft custom rule elements to do so. Those new rule elements are then available to the standard rule editor.

Sometimes GUI access isn't enough, and you really need to script something. Abacus provides both a SQL commandline and a perl module to allow easier creation of custom tools to access tickets.

ARF Support

ARF is the emerging standard for ISP feedback loops, replacing the older scomp format used at AOL and being used for almost all of the feedback loops being set up by ISPs large and small. Abacus supports ARF messages as first class objects.

Abacus is a client/server solution.

Supported platforms for the server are Solaris 8 or higher or RedHat Linux 7.2 or higher (other Linux distributions will run Abacus, but may need one or two additional compatibility libraries installed). We can also provide the server as a pre-built appliance, or provide a virtual server running on our systems.

The Abacus client will run on any recent version of Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris.