Straight to Major Incident

Question

Hi folks,

I've recently started a new job with a small company in IT. I've been put in charge of revamping the incident management process. We currently use Jira Service Desk cloud and I'm evaluating changing the process to incorporate Opsgenie.

Currently, when an Incident is raised in Jira, a support analyst handles all of the communications to the rest of the business through a company-wide email through a template. We are essentially using the Jira Incident ticket in the fashion to which I anticipate we will use Opsgenie's major incident process.

My main goal is here is speed, our process currently is slow and cumbersome (formatting a formal email is frustrating when you're attempting to fix a problem but I digress...) so I'm looking to remove all barriers for us in IT to make things as easy as possible when the heat is on.

Is there a way to almost 'bypass' the regular Jira Incident workflow and go straight to a major incident in Opsgenie? It's not a dealbreaker by any means, but our incidents are always major incidents to use the new wording, so using the 'old' incident page on service desk seems a bit redundant.

Appreciate any input!

Matt Nayler_w4aq6w · Answer

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the input. My team (IT) raise incidents manually at the moment and subsequently send out an email notification to the rest of the business.

The primary goal for using Opsgenie is to have it send out that communication for us to allow the analyst to continue with the task rather than having them tied up with manually formatting the email.

That was the spark that got me looking into Opsgenie but intending to make better use of the functionality on top as well, generating Slack channels and automatically raising incidents as well to name a few. There's a lot of hand-cranking in this place and looking to get it all running a bit more smoothly.

Chris Thomas_hfny00 · Answer

Lets start at the beginning, how does your team currently get notified of a major incident? Is it an automated email, a phone call or something else?

If it's a phone call I would create a new issue type or priority, set the Opsgenie integration to create an alert based on that using JQL and have Opsgenie take over from there sending out notifications that way.

If it's automated then I can't help much as I have only learned the free version of Opsgenie.