IT Incident Management: Accelerate Incident Resolution by IT Alerting in Jira Service Desk

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Over the past decade, organizations have increasingly leveraged technology and the digital realm in order to grow. However, as a result of this, they have also attracted an increased number of cyber threats.

Get started by asking forward-looking questions. You might have a security incident-management process in place, but have you tested it? When (not if) your organization is attacked, how will you respond? How will the IT department react? How will the operational side of your organization — and the communication arm of your organization—react? How will they work together to understand the problem, remediate the problem, and let partners and customers know what’s going on?

The good news is that in early 2020, a collaboration was announced between McAfee and Atlassian to help to bring advanced security and threat detection capabilities to Atlassian customers. Now Atlassian Cloud version users can effectively monitor, investigate, and prevent security threats.

The need for crisis planning

Effective preparation addresses the entire IT incidents lifecycle of readiness, response, and recovery.

Readiness

Readiness equates not only to vigilance, for example in the form of 24/7 monitoring but also to the readiness of resources. A well-prepared, multifunctional team must be poised to deal with all aspects of an incident or crisis. In addition, crisis simulation and war-gaming enable management to understand what can happen, which steps to take, and whether the organization is truly prepared.

Response

Management’s response can either contain or escalate an incident; indeed, a poor response can even create a crisis. Vigorous, coordinated responses to incidents limit lost time, money, and customers, as well as damage to reputation and the costs of recovery. Management must be prepared to communicate, as needed, across all media, including social media, in ways that assure stakeholders that the organization’s response is equal to the situation.

Recovery

Steps to return to normal operations and limit damage to the organization and its stakeholders continue after the incident or crisis. Post-event steps include assessments of the causes and the management of the incident or crisis, and the promulgation of lessons learned.

First line of defense

Staying a step ahead of cyberattacks requires a comprehensive, proactive, and risk-based approach to preventing, detecting, and responding to cyber threats. For modern enterprises operating in today’s hyper-connected business environment, the ultimate vision is to become a secure, vigilant, and resilient organization, an organization with solid defenses, expansive threat awareness, and strong response and recovery capabilities. 

One of the most important roles of the IT team is efficiently managing incoming alerts and incidents. When integrated with a monitoring system, automation can take incident management to a whole new level. Working together, these tools help to identify, analyze and prioritize incoming alerts and ensure that notifications are sent to the appropriate party if a serious issue is detected.

Introducing the Alert Catcher plugin to manage IT alerts, notifications, and incident.

Alert Catcher plugin for Jira Service Desk was created to be the first line of defense against system outages or changes that can turn into major incidents. By automatically monitoring systems and generating alerts for outages and risky changes, IT teams can minimize downtime — and the high cost that comes with it.

Alert Catcher plugin allows you to consolidate and automate alerts that emanate from mission-critical systems. All alerts and notifications can be customized based on preference, with escalations being creating tickets in Jira Service Desk.

The key features of plugin:

• Custom endpoint for creating and updating incidents. For updating incidents you can use alert id instead of Jira issue key.
• Ability to group incidents by rule and create mass incidents.
• Custom restrictions for creating and updating incidents.
• Support connection with McAfee, Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, etc.

Want to see Alert Catcher plugin in action? Try our Alert Catcher for Jira Service Desk app for free on the Atlassian Marketplace!

[M Amine]

Thank you for this article.

It would be great if it is possible to map alert info to custom fields. For our case, we used a basic integration using incoming emails with a regex parser.