Trackle was created by the Swarthmore College Computer Society to address the lack of tools to effectively manage the day to day work of UNIX system administrators. For the first time, the methodical approach of issue tracking, the freeform knowledge organization of a wiki, and the accountability afforded by change control and version management can be found in a single piece of software, Trackle.

Trackle's shell session tracking tools record system administrators work just as they would ordinarily, while keeping a precise record of all commands entered and all files changed. Without any high level description of what the session goals were, however, these records are of little use; that's why Trackle bootstraps categorization by associating each shell session log with a ticket in the issue database. Afterwards, sysadmins can further refine, reorganize, cross-reference and annotate shell session logs, free-form wiki pages, roadmap milestones and Tickets using Trackle's integrated wiki functionality.