With regards to the lack of visibility of the history of a ticket in NU Service. The Service Process team agreed that implementing a solution to this issue would be a priority in our next development cycle.

Our investigations identified feasible (albeit complex) configuration options that would work towards an improvement. However, the system provider contacted us last week in response to the concerns we expressed over such an important aspect being difficult to achieve.

We have been assured that one focus of the next version being released later this year is the History pane itself. This would improve two aspects of the system:

1. Providing the required visibility of the history of a ticket and
2. Improve the History pane that is hard coded in the system which adds little value as it currently exists.

With this in mind, we are going to postpone the configuration options that we were considering and instead feed in to the system provider’s initiative in the hopes that a robust solution can be designed and offered to us through an upgrade later this year.

We have identified that the search box at the top of NU Service in the analysts view produces the following error when searching with free text.

“There has been an unexpected error. Click Continue to return to the previous page.
Could not find file ‘\\campus\ha\ITSM\LIVE\KB\index\_e.cfs’.”

We have a problem record open (4000074) and are investigating the issue.

I can confirm that the search works when searching on a ticket reference.

Work to replace the web servers is currently in test stage; it is anticipated that the new web servers will be moved into the live environment (without the need for system downtime) during week commencing 25th May.

We are also in the process of testing an upgrade of NU Service to ensure it is running on the latest version. The aim is to go live with the upgrade during week commencing 1st June. Downtime will be communicated when this has been scheduled. Please note that this upgrade will not release new or changed functionality.

Our next steps after this work is to plan a development cycle to release new and/or improve existing system functionality. The planning for this will entail reviewing our issues and wish list database* that many of you have been contributing too. We acknowledge that improvements to visibility of the history within a ticket is a high priority.

*At the moment this is a private database used by the SP team for planning other purposes and is not suitable for sharing.  We may look at an appropriate way to share some relevant information such as this in the future.

There are two things that you can do to help us to understand more about the performance issues you experience:

1. On occasions when you experience issues with NU Service (of any sort) it is useful to know which web server was serving your NU Service session. To find this information delete the end of the URL to leave only https://nuservice.ncl.ac.uk/ within your address bar and type secure after the forward slash. For example:

If an analysts screen froze while they were reading a ticket with the URL: https://nuservice.ncl.ac.uk/LDSD.WebAccess.Integrated/wd/object/open.rails?class_name=ProblemManagement.Problem&key=82377f3f-6007-489d-b3f8-3d30ba4a6210. The URL should be edited to become: https://nuservice.ncl.ac.uk/secure

You will then be presented with a page of code, much of which can be ignored; the only part we are interested in is the first line of text at the top of the page (formatted in BOLD). Examples include: itsmweb3.ncl.ac.uk or itsmweb4.ncl.ac.uk. It is this text that indicates the web server in use at the time of the issues.

Please provide this piece of information together with the date/time of the issues and a description of the issue to the Service Desk.

2. If you perceive NU Service to be running slow for you, you can use F12 developer tools in Chrome to gather the actual times taken for page loads.
   To find this information, see our ‘how to guide’: F12 Developer tools.
   If you are concerned about load times then please provide details of the times together with the actions you were carrying out on the system and the date/time.

Thank you for any feedback.

Our investigations and work with technical teams remain ongoing to address issues affecting NU Service performance and reliability.

To address system reliability issues we are building new web servers to phase out and fully replace the old ones. These will be fully tested before adding to the live environment. Any system downtime or affect to users will be communicated in advance.

Investigations into the performance issues of NU Service uncovered an underlying problem with a component of one of the web services. This caused some users to experience page load delays of approx. 20 seconds. The issue has now been fixed which has restored performance to its usual level.

Work will continue in this area with the aim of further improving system performance.

Thank you to our technical teams.