Sync Service Desk with a separate instance of JIRA

Question

We are using cloud JIRA / Confluence and are evaluating JIRA Service Desk for our client facing portal.  I would like to leverage the knowlege base capabilities without exposing our internal Confluence assets, so I am thinking the safest way to do this is to establish a new instance for client facing, and link issues back to our internal JIRA instance.  I've read several things which suggest this is possible, but am a little lost on where / how to start.  I will have a group of internal users that will need to access & manage issues across both instances and would like to do this in as streamlined a manner as possible.  Can someone provide me some pointers?

- Establish a separate JIRA cloud instance for JIRA Service Desk and Confluence KB space ONLY

- Link issues fro JIRA Service Desk with issues in projects that reside in our current, internal only JIRA instace

- Keep the linked issues in sync to minimize the internal user need to traverse 2 instances so only Service Desk Agents will access the separate instance

- Ideally combine JIRA data across the 2 instances for dashboards / reporting, if possible

Thank you in advance for help!

Matthias Gaiser _K15t_ · Answer

As an alternative of Exalate, you can also have a look at the other issue sync solutions in the marketplace which all solve the use case of combining different Jira instances with each other.

atul kumar_a91mv5 · Answer

Thanks @Sue Marmion

Too bad jira doesn't provide this functionality by default.

Sue Marmion · Answer

Yes @atul kumar  We are using a plug in called Exalate that enables integration of up to 3 JIRA instances per pricing tier.  It is fairly easy to implement and their support has been really good when we have to work through a challenge.  We have had a few stability issues, but overall it is working in production, serving our largest client via JIRA Service Desk  with automatic creation / 2 way synchronization of incident tickets in our Main JIRA instance - as well as 'on demand' creation / synchronization capabilities within a number of non critical request workflows.