MSP Architecture Question: Single JSM Project vs Multiple Projects for Client Management

takayama_kotaro

I'm looking for advice on JSM architecture for our MSP environment and would love to hear from others who've faced similar decisions.

Our Situation
We're managing 100+ clients and currently debating between two approaches:

1. Current approach: Separate service project per client
2. Alternative: Single project with Organizations to manage multiple clients

The Challenge
Our current setup (separate projects) is becoming a maintenance nightmare:
- Identical configs across all projects but each needs individual updates
- Rolling out automation rule changes to 100+ projects is incredibly time-consuming
- Bulk ticket creation during incidents requires manual work across every project
- Management overhead scales linearly with client growth

What We're Weighing
- Operational efficiency vs Security isolation
- Scalability vs Flexibility
- Maintenance overhead vs Client data separation

Questions for the Community
1. Any other MSPs here? What architecture worked best for you at scale?
2. Has anyone successfully used the single-project + Organizations approach for true multi-tenancy?
3. Are there gotchas with client data isolation in the single-project model that we should know about?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

Dan Breyen

Hi @takayama_kotaro I am using one Project with multiple organizations in my JSM instance.

I would say it works pretty well, but there are a few improvements that would certainly help with keeping the different organizations separate.  Unless your system is setup to share each individual work item automatically with the whole organization, the Organization for the Reporter is not carried into the Organization for the Work Item. (JSDCLOUD-15131 , JSDCLOUD-14475 ) I needed to write an Automation to do this when a Service Request is created.  

Also, you are limited in JQL because the Organization field is not sortable ( JSDCLOUD-4548 ) which can be challenging when trying to do some reports.

We've been live now for about 1 1/2 years, and overall, it is working OK.  There are some other open JSM tickets related to Organizations that would help.  Feel free to vote for any that you see out there.  I know JSM can benefit from some more functionality around Organizations.

Hope that helps.