Jira combines Devs and Ops to take the heat out of Incident Management!

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This week at the Atlassian Summit, Atlassian announced its recent acquisition of OpsGenie, the self described "modern incident management platform", a software that helps alert engineers and developers to software and website outages so they can help track outages and minimize system downtimes. 

As anyone who has dealt with the "incident gods" would know, system incidents are incredibly stressful for all involved and communication and documentation is key in a time where teams likely don't even have a second to breathe!

Incident Management is often said to be like fire fighting, if fires aren't put out or controlled as soon as possible, they can quickly spark other fires along the way. Similarly, although being in the midst of an incident is highly stressful, making sure the incident is properly contained with appropriate communication will take the heat away from the situation, preventing miscommunication and misguided actions.

This is why Atlassian's most recent acquisition bodes an exciting time for Dev and Ops teams struggling to control incident management. 

The Challenges:

As Dev & Ops teams try to cobble together a united workflow for incident management, they have many options for alert and escalation tools and they also have chat collaboration in Slack that takes the context away from the issues.  After their support teams fix the issues, they have to communicate the incident to keep all stakeholders informed. All these 3rd party point solutions are creating a duplication of effort and, without clear ownership and context in one hub, a lot gets lost in translation.

While we all love Jira Service Desk, teams must synthesize all this information for postmortems that drive collaborative learning and action items to tackle in the future. 

In times of crisis, it's imperative that Dev and Ops teams can work together in unison, without wasting time updating multiple platforms on context, status and next steps.

The Solution:

Atlassian is demoing a new cloud product called Jira Ops. A cloud-only, (for now), offering that will help the Dev & Ops story finally have some meat.  This also demonstrates a solid DevOps story where you can show tangible value to Dev & Ops teams with a united incident management workflow, alerts and notifications, communication and collaboration all integrated into an information management command center. OpsGenie already features bi-directional integration between OpsGenie and Jira which can be used to forward alerts as issues to Jira or have Jira send issues to OpsGenie with detailed information. Ops Genie will determine the right people based on on-call schedules and notify them via email, text message, phone calls or IOS/ Android push notifications and escalate the alert until it is acknowledged or closed. This integration helps to sync creation, opening and closing of issues and comment management on both OpsGenie and Jira such that what happens on one platform is automatically reflected on the other. SIL™ scripting in Power Scripts™ can also be used to further customize other integrations between OpsGenie, Jira and PowerScripts™. 

This makes sure communication and documentation is recorded in real time automatically, leveraging Jira's powerful workflow engine, leaving the Dev and IT teams to stay focused on fixing the issues at hand and also keeping all the context and critical path close together under one umbrella on one platform.

Conclusion:

In incident management, every second counts and this new combination of Jira, OpsGenie and Power Scripts™ will help you close the gap of ever updating statuses and progress, bringing all the context together in Jira. Keeping all the context in Jira where the actual Dev work is happening means teams are not stuck jumping between 2 -5 different software tools searching for updates and context, allowing them to solve this issue at hand quickly and effectively. It also means that teams can enjoy the serious customization benefits which come with using Power Scripts™ in Jira to automate the incident management workflows. So don't waste time manually updating tickets in Jira and OpsGenie, let PowerScripts™ grant those wishes for you with a few lines of simple scripting!