How to aggregate assets to create a set of filterable fields for Jira tickets?

[Christopher Brown]

I want to track the hardware systems that my company produces as products and assign ownership to both internal and external parties. Each product is uniquely identified by a serial number.

I currently have a number of Jira projects associated with these assets, one project is called repairs - for managing when a product needs shipped back for repair. This project is managed by our field team. What I ultimately want is for our field team to be able to create an Repair issue in Jira and have two fields to help filter down the product that needs repaired:

1. Asset Owner Field
   1. This will allow the owner of a system to be selected
2. Asset Field
   1. This will only show the assets (serial numbers) associated with the asset owner selected above

The improvement to is quickly filter down the selectable serial numbers by owner rather than have our field team members try to select a serial number from a list of all serial numbers.

I have created an asset schema called Product. Each Product record uses the serial number as its object name and includes attributes for critical subcomponent hardware, such as cameras and computers, each identified by its own serial number. These attributes will be used to track RMA information when a subcomponent needs to be replaced.

Each Product may be assigned to a single owner. Owners are represented by three separate schemas:

• Customer
  Example: Customer A, address, contact information
• Internal Facility
  Example: Headquarters, address
• Internal Personnel
  Example: Person Z, address, department, role

One of the key requirements is to also track an assets location - so by having an address field associated with each owner, we can track where a system is via the assigned owner.

Here is where I am running into trouble.

I have three separate schemas that define all possible owners. However, when I create the Asset Owner field in Jira, I can only associate that field with a single asset schema. As a result, I can only select owners from one group at a time, either Customers, Internal Facilities, or Internal Personnel, instead of selecting from a single combined list that includes all three.

How can I aggregate these three asset schemas into a single list for my Jira fields?

[Andy Rusnak · Accepted solution]

Hi @Christopher Brown , 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!  

I just want to see if I understand this correctly, the field you reference that you can only relate a single schema to, that is a Jira Custom Field (that would be applied to a Work Item for example)?  

If that assumption is correct, it appears you have run up against the condition described within JSDCLOUD-16511. 

If so, you might be able to combine the individual schemas into a single schema marked Owner and then have the separate object types within that schema.  Would something like that work?  Or do you have to have 3 separate schemas for each type of owner? 

Best, 

Andy

[Christopher Brown]

Hi Andy,

Yes, you understand correctly. I am trying to relate more than one asset schema to a Jira custom field that is applied to a work item.

Thank you for pointing me to that issue. It looks like I have run into the same limitation described there.

Ideally, I would like to have three separate schemas. Conceptually, this feels like straightforward relational database design:

• The Owner field would have access to all three schemas.
• Other custom fields not mentioned on this post, used in different work types, would each have access to one of the schemas.

If everything has to live in a single schema it seems would end up with a large amount of irrelevant data exposed in certain contexts, which requires filtering just to show what is needed and effectively hide what is not. That approach feels harder to manage and more confusing overall.

[Andy Rusnak]

Hi Christopher, 

Thanks for the follow up and the clarity there.  I understand the concern of making it all one schema. There may also be 3rd party app solutions that could support the building of a custom field through Assets data in a different way.  I am not personally familiar with any, but it maybe possible since I know there are 3rd party apps that add their own custom field type capabilities.  The out of the box Assets field however would require a single schema.  

Best,

Andy

[Petru Simion _Simitech Ltd__]

Hi @Christopher Brown , 

If you are open to using apps, you can use Assets History Reporter for Jira , an app released y our team.

You can search your assets by various criteria and see what was changed and by whom. The result is exportable in csv format.

You can later agregate multiple searches in your csv file for Excel analysis.

Regards, 

Petru