Custom modules for iTop ITIL operations application

After sometime using various bug-tracking software like Jitterbug, Bugzilla and Mantis for IT ticketing tasks (quite weird example of use a tool for what has not being designed for), I started to need my own CMDB (which firstly I implemented directly into a MySQL DataBase), but soon I needed to related them together but the vast majority of tools were quite complex, big or hard to implement.

Finally I found iTop, which almost matches my needs, follows similiar ITIL ideas and processes I'm experienced or comfortably working and quite easy to customize/adapt to my needs.

This page documents some of the custom modules or modifications I made to better adjust iTop schema to my needs.

I recommend to overview the datamodel XML files to have a clear view of what's being modified, but a general overview of what my customizations are:

• For some subclasses of FunctionalCI, Ticket, SoftwareInstance, Contracts, … I pushed up in the class hierarchy some attributes like status, to make them more general
• Peripherals are attachable to devices (to know which systems are using it)
• Connectivity links, VLANs, interface and so have been highly modified in some versions to allow multiple VLANs in same link and now exactly the networks that are on an interface
• Added many additional tabs on object views to see related objects.

Some of this modifications highly increased the complexity of the modules and made them hard to mantain portable on each upstream new release. For that reason I'm going to redevelop them and drop some customizations, mainly my thoughts are:

• Drop ticketing management and focus on CMDB
• Avoid any PHP modification

Some issues I detected:

• Due some module parts implement code in PHP modules are not quite portable as should be
• Some permissions issues (lack of permissions) can arise
• Following upstream upgrades in the ticketing management modules are quite non-forward compatible

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Obviously iTop itself along with its own requirements. Although not needed if you are making a totally new install, may be recommended to install the iTop development toolkit which may help debug/integrate the modules on an existing install.

• Follow normal install procedure of iTop
• You need to deploy/copy the modules under extensions subfolder your iTop installation.
• Launch/browse normal iTop install wizard and select the modules

Obviously this software/stuff is provided as-is under the GPL without any support. But I provide here help on issues or known problems as I can.

In case you would like to contact me for some, well detailed and tested issue, or even better provide a fix/enhancement you can send me an email at srcmaster@l3jane.net

• iTop Wiki
• Customization
• XML reference
• iTop Demo