When I think of Interop, I tend to think of pretty technical vendors all gathered together in Vegas for 3 days of geeking out. What’s interesting, is an analysis of the trouble tickets that were opened in EM7 for Interop Vegas 2008, doesn’t necessarily play that story out. If the types of problems that exhibitors experienced are indicative of the staff in the booth, it seems like it was largely marketing people, and not engineers at all. Let’s take a brief look at the ticketing numbers:
A total of 155 trouble tickets were opened in the four days that the help desk was operational. Of these tickets:
- 91 were opened by exhibitors, these were opened by 75 different booths (of about 500).
- 28 were to report slow or no connections. Of these only 6 were related to the network (all before the show opened), usually they were things like patch cables not pushed all the way in. The remaining 22 were user error. Another interesting stat is that four of the tickets came from the same networking vendor and in each case it was their own gear that was misconfigured. I guess as users we shouldn’t feel bad when we have trouble getting configs right.
- The other 63 were change requests with the most common being a request to move an internet drop from one location in a booth to another.
- Two tickets were proactively opened by the InteropNet NOC team to notify/warn a vendor that a machine in their booth was infected and performing malicious scans of the network, in order to try and spread the infection. Without naming names here, it’s interesting that one of the companies was a security company and the other a very large software company.
- The remaining tickets were largely opened to track that activities of the NOC and InteropNet deployment teams as they deployed, tuned and maintained the network over the course of the show.
So what does this mean? It means that less about 15% of the exhibitors ran in to something that required them to open a ticket with the help desk and that in reality only 21% of those tickets were for valid issue, meaning only about 3% of the exhibitors actually had any issues. Further analysis shows that for the tickets where there actually was an issue, the issue was resolved in an average of 50 minutes, with the quickest in 11m and the longest at 2hr 39m. Finally, not a single valid exhibitor ticket was open during show floor hours. All issues occurred before the show began during the set-up phase.
Overall I think that these stats point to an efficient help desk and trouble shooting process that was facilitated by the link between the EM7 Trouble Ticketing system and Network Monitoring components that allowed quick validation of tickets so that the right teams could be dispatched.
