JIRA OPS Review

marnorautenbach

Hi Guys

 

Recently I was asked to play around with the full suite of Atlassian products to see if we can switch over to JIRA Software, Confluence and Service Desk for build as well as run tracking.

 

Below was my review of JIRA OPS. Am I wrong?

 

JIRA OPS : This is basically just a fancy front-end for incident management. The integrations from OPS to StatusPage and OpsGenie can be done in ServiceDesk as well via webhooks. JIRA OPS does not include different issue types other than incident and you cannot assign that incident to a team. What is useful though is the creation of slack channels via OPS per incident, but other than that, JIRA OPS does not offer anything more than service desk at the moment.

 

Marno

Mirek

Yes @marnorautenbach, you are right and I agree with you. The vision where you have everything in one place is good but not the current implementation.

That is not a separate product that you install and maintain. It is a simple project that exist next to other projects available only for Cloud instances and does not give you much benefit yet. If you are smart enough you can build the same idea (with same or different products) also.. and not spend much time on this. Normal Jira project with webhooks and good workflow can automate everything, inform everyone and basically do the same thing.. just requires smart people that know what they can do and what they need.

From my perspective I do not see a reason yet (except marketing and sales) to introduce this as a separate idea. This should be an extension (or new features) to Jira Service Desk where you already have first elements of Incident Management..  agents working behind the customer portal where people can raise issues/incidents .. SLA ... internal comments and those external to customers..

Why we need to duplicate those information just to have them in a separate project and pay additional money for Jira Ops licensing (since I am pretty sure it would cost some money per user/agent)? Why switching back and forth from SD to Ops to check SLA or choose which comment/information from SD should be included in Ops ticket? There should be a native and simple integration with Jira SD for StatusPage and OpsGenie.. Or the same idea (Ops) should be implemented as a module to Jira SD that you can easily turn on/off if you want. That is easier and it should be available for Cloud and Server tiers (not only Cloud to promote that platform).

Slack integration? Hmm.. Before it was easily possible to connect to HipChat from normal Jira projects (if you connected HipChat to Jira) and create rooms per ticket too, so for me that is nothing new (just promoting Slack as a dedicated chat). Overall JIRA Ops without integrations it is nothing more than just simple Jira Cloud project. So if you do not buy and use Slack, OpsGenie and StatusPage (and of course SD) for you sadly it would not be so useful.

Someone could say .. yes but there would be new features like Postmortems (some kind of reviews after incidents). Great idea, but for me this is not Incident Management anymore.. It is Problem Management and mostly a different team should handle that in a different project. Incident Management team is not responsible for finding the root cause of the issue. They just fix the problem as soon as possible (in specific SLA) and communicate this back to the users. If they need to spend time of choosing valid information for Jira Ops ticket, creating dedicated rooms and from those rooms also choose information that is useful .. update customer portal and SLA .. that sound like additional work to people busy with troubleshooting an incident. And usually most of the critical incidents with applications and systems these days are resolved by executing a simple reboot/reindex.