end-to-end testing of OTRS

[otrsnewbie]

Hi,

I am trying to configure Nagios to test OTRS is operational. All resources I was able to find so far relate to setting Nagios to monitor OTRS queues and generate alerts about escalated tickets and stuff. Any advice now to actually do OTRS functionality test Nagios is appreciated.

I would like Nagios to test:
1. OTRS receives messages from external world
2. OTRS sends an auto-response and these auto-responses reach external world
3. OTRS sends a notification to the agents and these notifications reach the agents

I have set check_email_delivery plugin of Nagios to send email to OTRS and to confirm that OTRS responds. The plugin uses an external SMTP/IMAP server (first tried Gmail, but was immediately blocked, now using postfix+dovecot on an external vps). This takes care of #1 and #2 above. To address #3 I am considering creating a test agent and have its mailbox checked by Nagios for notifications.

The problem is that currently my check uses info@ mailbox which is linked live OTRS queue, which means the human agents see these notifications, which is not nice. I guess I could add PostmasterFilter, have it identify the test tickets by From header. But then, how to I set OTRS to (i) send-auto-response as usual, (ii) avoid sending out notifications to human agents and only send it to the test agent, (iii) close the ticket right away.

Currently it looks all too cumbersome and I have a feeling I have to go to with a dedicated test queue with a dedicated mailbox and do all tests there. But this to some extent would defeat the purpose whole test as I would like to have end-to-end test of the ticketing system.

Any ideas are appreciated.

Best regards,
Alex