An update to incident management in Jira Service Management and Opsgenie

TL;DR In December '21 we announced changes to the incident management workflow for all Jira Service Management Cloud customers, since then we have heard from many of you that these changes negatively impacted your incident workflows. In this post, we outline what happened, and the steps we are taking to correct the issues.

 

In December we announced major changes to the incident management workflow for all Jira Service Management Cloud customers. These updates represent a major step towards combining all incident management capabilities in Jira Service Management.

The goal of this project is seamless end-to-end incident management, with 100% of the features and functionality found in Opsgenie carried over to Jira Service Management and available to incidents of all types.

In Dec we added a “major incident” toggle to the incident details screen, when toggled to the on position the incident becomes a major incident in Jira Service Management. Previously, to create a Major Incident, you clicked “Create Major Incident” which would link you to Opsgenie where the corresponding Major Incident would be created.

We also announced other Opsgenie features are now available in Jira Service Management including Slack integration, update internal stakeholders, incident investigation view, create incident conference call, and Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs).

0_1_majorincident.png

At the same time, we removed the Opsgenie UI, links, and the “Create major incident” button in Jira Service Management.

02_oglinks.png

We have received feedback from many of you that the removal of the Opsgenie UI and links has either broken your incident management workflow or made it difficult to manage your incident response.

For this, we are sorry.

Looking back, we were excited and focused on the features and functionality that were being added to Jira Service Management, but we did a bad job of communicating what was being removed.

Because of the changes we made, it became challenging to navigate between Jira Service Management and Opsgenie to complete common incident workflows that many of you have been using for a long time.

So what steps are we taking today to start fixing this issue?

First, we’re adding an “Opsgenie incidents” link back into Jira Service Management that takes you directly to your open Opsgenie incidents. You will see this link become available in your instance within the next two weeks. This restores a clear path from Jira Service Management to Opsgenie for customers who want to create incidents in Opsgenie. Here’s what it will look like.

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It’s important to note that all of the incident features we added to Jira Service Management in our Dec '21 release (Slack integration, update internal stakeholders, incident investigation view, create incident conference call, and Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs)) are available for any incident in Jira Service Management, not just major incidents.

Second, we're going to do a better job of explaining the context of our product changes via in-app messages that link to updated documentation, the screenshots below show the updated tooltips and links that we are including.

If you haven't turned on the major incident toggle in Project settings yet, you’ll see this notification on the bottom left-hand side of the screen with instructions on how to add it to your instance.

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To add the major incident toggle navigate to Project Settings > Incident management, on this screen we also added a link back to Opsgenie for those customers who prefer to create incidents there.

2_IM_settings.png

Once it's turned on in settings, you will see a major incident toggle on the incident details screen in Jira Service Management. When toggled to the on position any incident in Jira Service Management becomes a major incident. Note that major incidents in Jira Service Management do not sync to Opsgenie.

3_Incident_toggle_hover.png

In Opsgenie when you click “create incident” we now provide a link back to Jira Service Management for customers who prefer to create incidents there.

5_Opsgenie_create_incident.jpg

What’s Next?

Today's update adds helpful links and in-product context about incidents but there is plenty more to come and our team is hard at work on it. Our goal remains the same, deliver seamless end-to-end incident management, with 100% of the features and functionality found in Opsgenie available in Jira Service Management to incidents of all types.

Please let us know of any questions you have in the comments below, and thank you for being a Jira Service Management customer.

12 comments

Gary Blower _Clearvision_ March 7, 2022

Thanks for this. I think it is also worth mentioning that the new Jira Service Management (Cloud) integration for Opsgenie (https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/integrate-opsgenie-with-jira-service-management-cloud/) can also be used to replicate Opsgenie's incident rules from Alert to Major Incident, and create those incidents in Jira Service Management.

Nick Nader - Isos Technology
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March 10, 2022

Yea this change does not make sense for me or for our customers.

This change now means that in order to track incidents from JSM customer request to Opsgenie to Statuspage, we have to create the incident manually in Opsgenie.

Why would you remove the functionality to have incidents tagged as "major" to be created in Ospgenie. How exactly are we supposed to replicate incidents into OG for the operations teams now without having to do so manually?

Is the point here to not have any of the Opsgenie functionality actually be in Opsgenie? Cause there is still all the of OG team configuration that JSM does not have (i.e. routing rules, escalation policies, and on-call schedules).

It made sense previously that those would only be invoked when dealing with major incidents originating from JSM customers. Now that notification/alert scheme in OG cannot be utilized without manually creating incidents in OG.

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Gary Blower _Clearvision_ March 10, 2022

@Nick Nader - Isos Technology  I agree. 

I have found the workaround is to use the newly released Jira Service Management (Cloud) Opsgenie integration. It is in early access, but allows for the Jira ticket to be triggered to/from Alerts and even automatically links the alert to the JSM incident. I have had some success replicating the Opsgenie Incident Rules with the escalation and on-call schedules are still honoured on the incident alert; plus the Statuspage updated. I have had to add extra labels/tags to control it but it does work (labels from Jira issues become tags in the Alert).

See 

https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/integrate-opsgenie-with-jira-service-management-cloud/

Nick Nader - Isos Technology
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March 10, 2022

@Gary Blower _Clearvision_ 

Ah yea I saw your comment above, but didn't think it could replicate all the Incident functionality in OG since you can only create OG Alerts from it.

I guess what you did basically covers most of what is left over in OG that they haven't moved to JSM proper now that deployment/commit investigation is in there.

Definitely something that would be hard for customers to grasp on a demo or talked through, but thanks for the workaround!

Hoping Atlassian considering the whole picture in the future and pushes all of these changes at once either separating OG out of JSM entirely, or fully integrating the two natively. These partial function updates are painful.

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Charlie Misonne
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March 11, 2022

@Gary Blower _Clearvision_ 

With the new integration: when an alert is automaticaly created from a JSM incident: do you also get double alerts in OpsGenie? 1 from the new integration and 1 from the "standard" integration that is enabled when using the bundled OpsGenie that comes with JSM?

Gary Blower _Clearvision_ March 11, 2022

@Charlie Misonne Yes you get the responder Alerts (the ones with the R) and the incident issue alert itself if you use the new integration (if you allow this. It can be filtered in the new integration).

You can create an alert policy rule to suppress/ignore the notification or even auto close these alerts. You can also toggle the responder alerts off in JSM.

I've tended to leave the responder alerts on and just suppress the notification from the new integration alert if the source is not major incident (I use a label/tag to identify it is from a major incident as the integration doesn't currently pass the 'major incident' field value but does pass labels - set with automation). 

The new integration at least gives you options now to setup incident rules from Opsgenie alerts that raise the issue in Jira and vice-verse. It is still a workaround I hope we continue to see improvements to streamline it back to how it was with the original OG major incident behaviour.

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Charlie Misonne
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March 11, 2022

Thanks for sharing this @Gary Blower _Clearvision_

When using the new integration their should be an option to disable the out of the box integration for alerts. Let's hope things will improve indeed.

Shaun Pinney
Atlassian Team
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March 15, 2022

Hi, @Nick Nader - Isos Technology  and thank you @Gary Blower _Clearvision_ for the helpful information on using the Opsgenie Jira Service Management integrations.

I appreciate you taking the time to write in here and on the partner portal. Rather than reply multiple times let me try and add some context and answers to each of your questions right here.

Q: This change now means that in order to track incidents from JSM customer requests to Opsgenie to Statuspage, we have to create the incident manually in Opsgenie

A: Yes that is correct.

 

Q: Is the point here to not have any of the Opsgenie functionality actually be in Opsgenie?

A; The end goal is to bring all alerting and incident features into Jira Service Management so there is no need to tab between the two products and UIs, this began with the December '21 release. Today a gap in feature parity exists between Opsgenie and Jira Service Management, the team is hard at work to close that gap. So, the best course of action in the meantime is using the updated Jira Service Management Opsgenie integration to replicate incidents into Opsgenie, here’s more info on the new integrations.

 

Q: Hoping Atlassian considers the whole picture in the future and pushes all of these changes at once either separating OG out of JSM entirely or fully integrating the two natively. These partial function updates are painful.

A: Our end goal is to reach feature parity between Opsgenie and Jira Service Management alerting and incident capabilities for incidents of all types, not just major incidents. This is true today, you can use the major incident features in Jira Service Management for any incident not only a major incident. I hear you on the partial updates, and I hope to have a roadmap update to share soon about the next wave of features we are bringing into Jira Service Management.

 

Q: Now that notification/alert scheme in OG cannot be utilized without manually creating incidents in OG.

A: You can still leverage the alert and notification capabilities you were used to in Opsgenie check out these two articles for more info, https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/add-or-remove-the-responders-panel-from-your-service-project/ and https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-responder-alerts/

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Paul Van Liew April 7, 2022

Reiterating end goals doesn't change the in-the-meantime. Breaking integrations and workflows, without any possible replacement, in the name of "but in the future!" is the worst conceivable customer experience and path to development. This is mind boggling, and clearly done by product managers that have never worked in the field. It reeks of a Jira person taking over and the Opsgenie world being put to bed. Incidents are about smooth quick workflows and visibility, triaging, and integration between all systems so that the correct things are raised at the right time depending on triggers.

What's happening now is a Jira workflow for incident follow-up. Everything will have to go back to and through Opsgenie for years to come, and by breaking integrations already and forcing manual work, you're putting your product lightyears behind all competition, destroying the entire purpose for people to use Opsgenie vs. Pagerduty ("well it's in the suite of Atlassian products, it must integrate better!"), and ignoring the entire systems integration part of Services and escalations and so on.

JSM is neither a service catalog, nor an incident management product, nor a triage area, and is multiple years from being competent at any of those, especially at Atlassian's speed of development.

And in the meantime, broke the only workaround workflows people had to shoehorn these poor products together, further alienating the customer base, for what? What a Jira product manager thinks people will endure for their poor interpretation of what the competition is doing and Atlassian can deliver as barebones in 18 months?

All I can see is being forced to move nearly $100,000 in licensing elsewhere. Competitors have made migration tools easier than Atlassian has made even integrating its own products' basic capabilities.

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paul_creedy December 7, 2022

Because of Christmas period and staff on leave, I've started to look at OpsGenie JSM integration only to find out that one of the reasons we choose JSM in the first place has now been broken.  

End users put tickets/issues in, and I wanted the agent that was on call to be alerted via OpsGenie.  If someone has to manually enter this into OpsGenie, then they would have already seen the issue and therefore we wouldn't need to enter it in OpsGenie.

If you are planning on bringing features into JSM from OpsGenie at least implement those features before removing what's already in place.

Someone obviously didn't think this through before pulling the plug.

10 months on from the original 'Whoops we got it wrong post' and OpsGenie still doesn't alert those on call when an incident issue in JSM is created, at least not from what I can see.

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Austin Alejandro August 16, 2023

Are there any updates with this integration plan?

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Markus March 1, 2024

It is beyond me why you removed functionality. Links back and forth to "create" is not at all functional or efficient.

Id love to hear a more detailed reason why this was removed. And the "fixes" are not fixes, just a bandaid on a problem from removing a function.

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