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Can Jira help with datacenter incident management?

Alex Gerulaitis_9or28t

Hello Jira community,

Does anyone use JSD (or JSM) for datacenter incident management? Mainly when the majority of tickets are generated by machines, scripts, or monitoring software rather than humans, and they need to be automated (routed, escalated, prioritized) based on what's in them: source, subject, body? Sort of like inbound mail rules: if the sender is "VMWare" and the subject contains "unexpectedly" and "down", then set priority to P3, assign to "VMWare admins", and set the SLA to 15 minutes.

Reason I ask: my team is attempting to evaluate JSD for the purpose, and I am not finding some of the core and necessary functionality that I've been taking for granted in Zendesk and ServiceNow: ability to route and automate tickets based on sender's email address (or other forms of identity such as tags). I've described some of the basic automations I am looking for in "basic JSD (tag-based) automations?" if that helps.

Additional context:

I work for a large enterprise and been given admin rights on a JSD project (Jira 8.13). Also set up a "free edition" of JSM in Jira Cloud. Finding sender tagging (or other ways to automate tickets based on sender identity) in neither.
The evaluation is not for the entire enterprise but for a minor project (on the scale of things) with only one person (me) managing it in addition to a gazillion of other hats being worn - so APIs, add-ons or anything more-or-less sophisticated is likely not feasible. We'd like something that works OOTB like Zendesk for sender-based automations. (JQL is fine.)
The reason we'd like to migrate away from Zendesk: not adopted at scale by the corp., and doesn't do many of the things Jira does.

Thank you for any hints and tips.

Comments

Gerhard Schmidlechner

Hi Alex,

if you can‘t find the functionality you are looking for, you should have a look at the big plug-in universe of Atlassian.
Maybe start by looking for Script Runner for Jira or Jira Misc Workflow Extensions (JWME)

When you look on the plug-in page, you will even find further automation plug-ins that might be a better choice for your need.

I hope that helps - let me know if you have found something appropriate😊

Gerhard Schmidlechner

Have you had a look into OpsGenie before? That might be a bit more of what you actually looking for.

Choon Keat Seet

Are you on jira cloud or data center?

To answer your question Yes you can, probably with automations using JMWE, JSU or scriptrunner post custom postfunction that searches the summary field(youlll usually do it in nunjucks for cloud usually and groovy/java on jira DC)

However imho you are better off with a normal jira project creating tickets through either email or the REST API.(Due to the customer visibility concern) And have different projects with different recipient inboxes

The jira cloud rest api

https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/api-group-issues/#api-rest-api-3-issue-post

The JSD also comes with a rest API as well, so you can try that

https://docs.atlassian.com/jira-servicedesk/REST/4.15.0/#servicedeskapi/request-createCustomerRequest

Its also easier if you have something like pagerduty or opsgenie(do note its free for up to 5 users so you might as well test with this), they will have built in methods to create jira tickets so you skip the API fiddling.

Hope this helps you along

Patrick Schuh [brainbits]

Sounds that OpsGenie is what you are looking for. It is available as a stand alone service and can be integrated with JSM Data Center (on premise). It is also „bundled“ with JSM in the cloud. But in the Cloud the features included differ from plan to plan. You might have a look at the premium and enterprise level to find the kind of „Alert-Management“ you are seeking for. The approach is a little bit different than what you are described above: not every incoming „signal“ creates a ticket. Instead all incoming signals are analyzed based on the kind of defined rules you described. And as a result Alerts or incidents are generated for JSM.

Alex Gerulaitis_9or28t

Thanks @Choon Keat Seet, appreciate the answers.

At work it's Datacenter. (I've also started a free edition JSM outside of work to play with.)

Just to confirm: OOTB (out of the box), neither Jira DC nor JSD can do that?

(E.g. "when ticket is created, if requester == 'server-01' and title contains 'fail*', then set (incident type, assignment group, priority, etc.)"

In order to get the above automation working in Jira, I would need to:

purchase a 3rd party app like JMWE (a tall order for a large enterprise with a single Datacenter instance of Jira and any add-on software requiring a security review and approval in addition to the usual "business justification"), and
possibly also set up something like OpsGenie for alerting flexibility?

Does this sound right?

Thanks again.

Alex Gerulaitis_9or28t

Have not. Was hoping for something like, "yeah, of course Jira can do that out-of-the-box - here's a tutorial with screenshots!". Guess that's not in the cards. Will look into OpsGenie (I've heard of people using it at work) - but not sure we have it integrated with Jira at work.

Thanks!

Alex Gerulaitis_9or28t

Thank you. (If you could refer me to a write-up describing how to set up Jira+OpsGenie for the type of automations I mentioned, please do. So far not finding anything that mentions sender tagging or sender-based automations. Also not seeing anything mentioning OpsGenie in the free JSM instance I've set up - perhaps because it's unavailable for freeloaders like me? )

Choon Keat Seet

OOTB You should still be able to create with fields via the api, something like this for single select(Simple drop down custom fields)

"customfield_11449" : { "value": "option3" }

This is documented at a section called "Field Input Formats"

https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/rest-apis/

You can try with postman.

Do note that what you use in JIra Cloud is incredibly different from what you use in JIRA DC, they are 2 very diffferent products if you are maintaining and working to integrate with them. The REST APIs can be very diffferent.

If you are on DC, your corporate environment probably wouldn't mind paying for addon if you can justify. Personally JMWE works for me because its so simple and easy to use. BUT scriptrunner for JIRA DC has a lot of capabilities, one of which rest endpoints, i.e you create a rest endpoint (not the rest API) https://scriptrunner.adaptavist.com/latest/jira/rest-endpoints.html

It also provides access to the JIRA API through custom post functions

The atlassian JIRA API you can see can allow you do almost anything you want

https://docs.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/api/8.15.0/

There's a few other addons that are also powerful but i dont have access cant say much

So yes you can do it out of box but if you wish to evaluate do so with a trial , it makes your life so much easier then fiddling with rest calls

Opsgenie is helpful from source end, like you may have hundreds of different capabilties on different platforms. having all of them alert opsgenie /pagerduty and ahve that fire into jira will simplify things. But it also increases the vectors for things not working like they should so its a judgement call based on environment.

Hope this helps

John Funk

Not sure of your exact scenario but Opsgenie is working very well for us.

Matthew

You should be able to do this with the built in JSM Automation in Project Administration.

Got to Project Settings, click Automation.
Click Add Rule
Select Custom Rule
Give it a name then click Add Trigger, to the right click Add Trigger again.
Select Issue Created, then click Add.
Click in the "IF" box, then click Add Condition.
Select Issue Matches, then select fields and corresponding values OR click Advanced to enter JQL like this for your use case:
```
Creator = "VMWare" AND Summary ~ "unexpectedly" AND Summary ~ "down"
```
In the "THEN" box, click Add an Action, then click Add Action
Select Assign User to Issue then search for the user to assign and click Confirm.
Click Add Action again
Select Set Priority to Issue, then select the priority (P3) and click Confirm.
Near the top right of the page, click Options and select who the rule will run as.
At the bottom right, ensure "Enable Rule" is checked then click Save.

SLA is different.

Got to Project Settings, click SLAs.
Select an SLA to edit or Create a new one

Under "Goals", set the Issue IQL for the SLA, for your use case it's:

Priority = P3 AND Creator = "VMWare" AND Summary ~ "unexpectedly" AND Summary ~ "down"

Set the Goal to 15m
Click Add then Save and re-calculate SLAs as prompted.

The built in Automation in JSM isn't great, but it'll work for your use case. I much prefer the Automation for Jira app; it's a more robust solution. I believe it's included with Jira Cloud, but paid in Server/DC.

Darryl Lee

FYI this is the reference for JSM Automations in DC:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/servicemanagementserver/automating-your-service-project-939926334.html

In Cloud, those automations have been renamed "Legacy Automation".

It will be interesting to see if Atlassian eventually pushes the "new" Automation everywhere, although I think that would mean they'd need to build out support for things like changing SLA Goals, as you can do in the Legacy Automation, as Matthew described.

Jaime Capitel

Hi @Alex Gerulaitis,

A quick hint on how to play with Opsgenie in your JSM Cloud instance: You should create a project with the new ITSM template.

The source is in this recent article. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/whats-new/jira-service-management-powered-by-opsgenie

Hope that helps.

Alex Gerulaitis_9or28t

It does - but I think I messed up a bit by omitting some of the critical context (added it to the OP above):

The evaluation is not for the entire enterprise but for a minor project (on the scale of things) with only one person (me) managing it in addition to a gazillion of other hats being worn - so APIs, add-ons or anything more-or-less sophisticated is likely not feasible. We'd like something that works OOTB like Zendesk for sender-based automations. (JQL is fine.)

In other words: while we may in the future consider tinkering with APIs and add-ons, for now we just need the ability to put a JQL "if" statement into a rule that looks at the sender's email address. @Matthew's suggestion is the closest I am seeing to a possible solution - except I can't seem to be able to use an arbitrary email address: getting this:

The value 'thermometer555@hellonearth.com' does not exist for the field 'creator'.

...yet also can't add new user with that (or any other) email address to "users" in the project - I seem to be limited to the available choices.

Brant Schroeder

@Alex Gerulaitis

We do something very similar. We have used automations in the past to accomplish the changes. The issue is that automations have more overhead than placing something in the workflow on create for instance. So as we became more complex in out logic and routing we ended up moving away from automations to the JSU App - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/5048/jsu-automation-suite-for-jira-workflows?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview We also use ScriptRunner as it is the most powerful than JSU and we seem to gain more efficiencies using it as well https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/6820/scriptrunner-for-jira?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview

The apps are free to download and install so I would suggest testing them out.

Laurens Coppens

@Alex Gerulaitis

To share my experience, I have done a lot of Jira Service Management implementations in IT teams and datacenter teams, so yes, it is definitely the perfect tool to manage those incidents.

In addition we use insight to gain asset views on tickets, see what the impact is of a switch going down, that in combination with opsgenie (now embedded in JSM cloud) to send alerts gives you a lot of opportunities to gain structure and manage your environment.

So in summary, JSM + Insight + Opsgenie is a toolset that will definitely support your needs.

On JSM you will have to use (as mentioned by other above) automation to do auto ticket assignment, changing priorities, ...

You can use scriptrunner to do some more magic if you need advanced scripting.

Hope this helps,

Laurens

Alex van Vucht (GLiNTECH)

@Alex Gerulaitis

Yes, the flexibility of Jira Service Management is a tremendous blessing and there are at least 10 ways to do what you're thinking about. These ways are all accessible by users without requiring consultants or developers to implement.

The simplest way is to create queues for the different sources of requests. In JSM, a ticket can appear in multiple queues simultaneously, depending on the JQL filter for that queue.

Marking up the ticket based on the reporter is an automation action and again, this all depends on what you take up. My favourite approach is to use the Insight Custom Field's 'Assign to IQL' setting to automatically add configuration items to a ticket based on the reporter. I've seen implementations, for instance, where an Active Directory profile is attached to the reporter, as well as the services owned by the reporter's team. These services can then be listed on a separate Insight Custom Field so that you can then you Jira and Insight reporting on the affected services.

Gonchik Tsymzhitov

Hi @Alex Gerulaitis ,

Before suggesting can I ask a few questions?

Do you understand the purpose of monitoring tools, alerting and tracking tools ?

Do you need a cheap solution then on Zendesk ?

Also, do you use the monitoring tools ? That tools already used priority on your infra?

If so, what do you think those priorities are correct ?

If so, you need to have a automation to tracking (JSM) and alerting (i.e. OpsGenie ) as I read.

If not, please, review existing monitoring tool.

Could you share please more info?

Alex Gerulaitis_9or28t

Thanks everyone for the answers! Understood:

Jira (JSD or JSM) can do what I need (sender-based automations) OOTB w/o requiring additional tools - thanks to @Matthew's detailed write-up.
Jira has plenty of additional tools and ways to accomplish the same - "at least 10 ways to do what you're thinking about" per @Alex van Vucht (GLiNTECH) - from OpsGenie and JWME to JSU and Script Runner.

The next step for me is to work with our Jira enterprise support team to get a project up and running with the right functionality so we could test our incident response workflows.

Thanks again, much appreciate everyone's input.

Dave LIAO

@Gerhard Schmidlechner @Choon Keat Seet @Matthew @Patrick Schuh [brainbits] @Jaime Capitel @Darryl Lee @Brant Schroeder @Laurens Coppens @Alex van Vucht (GLiNTECH) @Gonchik Tsymzhitov

Thank you all for chiming in, and supporting each others's responses)! 🙏

Gerhard Schmidlechner

@Herbert Grömer Might be an interesting discussion for us as well right?

G subramanyam

I'm late to this discussion and liked all the conversations. I'm seeing OpsGenie as the value addition tool for JSM.

M Amine

+1 me too. @G subramanyam totally right ...

Paloma Fondon Araujo

I also believe that Opsgenie has an incredible potential and many features to add value, although I would like to explore it a little more, I think many customers would benefit a lot in the day to day.

Fabio Racobaldo [Catworkx]

+1 me too

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