Hello everyone,
I’d like to introduce myself. I manage application development and business solutions for a multinational company, and I am currently evaluating the possibility of replacing our existing ticketing platform with an open-source solution.
My attention has recently focused on Zammad. From a technology perspective, it appears modern, well maintained, and highly customizable, especially regarding custom fields and workflow management. I am currently running a Proof of Concept, and so far the experience has been very positive.
Before moving forward and extending the evaluation to a broader group of colleagues and stakeholders, I would like to benefit from the experience of the community and understand whether I am heading in the right direction.
I would be extremely grateful for any advice or feedback on the following topics:
1. Approval workflows and audit trail
Is it possible to implement an approval process only for specific ticket types (for example, Change Requests)?
In addition, for audit and compliance purposes, we need to keep track of:
- who approved the request,
- when it was approved,
- and ideally the approval history over time.
What is the recommended approach in Zammad?
2. Reporting and Power BI integration
We are considering using Power BI for reporting and analytics.
Has anyone implemented this successfully?
Would you recommend:
- consuming data through the REST APIs,
- reading directly from the PostgreSQL database,
- or creating a dedicated reporting database/data warehouse layer?
I would appreciate hearing about real-world experiences, advantages, and limitations.
3. Scalability
Our expected workload is approximately:
- 150 tickets per day,
- 4,000 customers,
- around 100 agents.
Would a single Zammad instance comfortably handle this volume?
Is there any reason to consider multiple parallel installations, or would that unnecessarily increase complexity?
4. Backup and disaster recovery
I noticed that the Docker deployment includes a container called zammad-backup.
How does the backup mechanism work in practice?
Specifically:
- What data is backed up?
- Where are backups stored?
- What is the recommended restore procedure?
- Are there any best practices for production environments?
5. Managing a large number of groups
With a relatively high number of agents and support teams, I am concerned that group management could become difficult over time.
Are there recommended strategies or best practices for:
- organizing groups,
- structuring support teams,
- maintaining permissions,
- and avoiding an overly complex or disorganized group structure?
6. Ticket reassignment and absence management
Is it possible to reassign tickets from one agent to another:
- manually,
- automatically,
- or based on absence/out-of-office scenarios?
For example, if an agent is on vacation or unavailable, can ticket ownership be reassigned automatically or through workflow automation?
7. Multi-company / multi-organization environments
Our company is part of a larger group consisting of multiple legal entities and brands.
We are evaluating whether a single Zammad instance could support multiple companies while maintaining:
- separate routing rules,
- dedicated support teams,
- organization-specific reporting,
- and appropriate visibility restrictions.
Has anyone implemented a similar setup, and what approach would you recommend?
8. Licensing and recommended packages
While evaluating Zammad, I am also trying to understand the best licensing and packaging strategy for a medium-to-large enterprise environment.
For organizations with:
- approximately 4,000 customers,
- around 100 agents,
- approval workflows,
- reporting requirements,
- and potential integrations with tools such as Power BI, Microsoft 365, and automation platforms,
which package or edition would you strongly recommend?
More specifically:
- Which features have proven most valuable in real-world deployments?
- Are there any paid features that you would now consider essential?
- Are there specific packages that provide a significantly better experience in terms of administration, reporting, security, or workflow management?
- If you started a new deployment today, which edition would you choose and why?
I would be particularly interested in hearing from organizations that have already moved from a commercial ITSM/ticketing platform to Zammad and can share lessons learned regarding licensing and feature selection.
Thank you very much in advance for your time and insights. Any feedback from production environments would be extremely valuable for our evaluation process.