How do I set up Service Desk on an Azure Virtual Machine?

[West Christy]

I'm in IT for a small company. Recently we got new management and they suggested we use Jira Service Desk for a ticketing system. They mentioned that I should set up the service desk on a VM we set up in Azure. This is my first time really working with servers like this. I have installed Service Desk on the server and can access it there just fine. Is there a way to set it up so I can just access it from our browser rather than logging in via Remote Desktop and using the browser there? This is just for our agents to view tickets and issues, it's not a customer portal.

Every time I think I find the solution, it ends up being a ton of things I'm not sure are necessary, but they aren't context specific. If someone could at least point me in the right direction, that would be great. Thank you. 

[Shaun S]

Welcome to the Community! There are several reasons why your Service Desk instance isn't reachable in a browser, but knowing more about the environment will certainly help. If you attempt to reach Service Desk in a browser using http://<ip_address:8080? If not,  the first thought that comes to mind is security settings.  If incoming traffic to the port Service Desk is served on(the default being 8080) is being blocked, you won't be able to connect in your browser.  I would check the settings in the VM under Windows Firewall if the VM is a Windows machine, and settings for selinux, iptables, etc. if this is a Linux VM.  You can test if port 8080 is open by running  telnet <ip.address> 8080 . If you don't receive a "connected" response it likely confirms the firewall theory.

It's also worth mentioning that if you're able to access Service Desk in a browser, anyone else can too since it's accessible over the web. While that's not inherently a problem since authentication is required, it does come with some considerations to be made from a security standpoint.  If Service Desk is only going to be accessed internally on the local network, configuring it locally may be preferable if you have the hardware.  

Edit:

I forgot to mention that the port could be blocked on the Azure level.  I'd recommend checking the network security settings for the VM in your Azure portal to see if any rules are in place that would block the port.