Managing User Requests With the Grand Unified Task System (GUTS)

As system administrators who are also full-time students, we aim to minimize the time we spend approving and carrying out standard tasks that comprise much of our day-to-day work. The less time required for these repetitive tasks, the more time we have available to provide new and exciting services to our community.

To facilitate the automation of this process, we have created the Grand Unified Task System (GUTS), which consists of a small core (a web interface and task executor) that unites task request processing for a range of modular services. This design allows for enhanced security and makes the system easily understandable and extensible, especially to new administrators. The Python backend provides deep integration with standard UNIX tools; the Django-based frontend provides a web interface friendly to both users and administrators. These design decisions have proven successful: deploying GUTS in production allowed us to dramatically reduce our response time for approving tasks, reach a much larger portion of our potential user base, and more easily support a diverse array of new services.