Announcing: Incident Responders and Linked Alerts in Jira Service Management

[#1]

THESE FEATURES ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR ALL CUSTOMERS

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Hello Atlassian Community!

Today, we’re excited to announce the rollout of two new incident management features in Jira Service Management Cloud to help you respond to and resolve incidents faster:

Use Alerts To Notify Incident Responders

You can now add, view, and remove multiple people and teams as incident responders directly from Jira Service Management.

Adding a responder will send a responder alert to the relevant user(s), notifying the right people to resolve incidents more quickly.

Alerts will also now be sent to assignees on incidents and the owners of any affected services added to incidents, as long as they have Opsgenie access and alert notification preferences set up.

For existing projects: Alerts are off by default, but admins can turn alerts on in their Incident Management settings page.

For new projects: Responder alerts will now be on by default for any new projects created in Jira Service Management.

Link Monitoring Alerts to Incident

You can now link and show monitoring alerts related to affected services directly from the incident view in Jira Service Management in order to improve information visibility for your incident response team and reduce time to resolution.

How do I get access to these new features?

These features will be available in your instance over the coming few weeks.

Keep a look out for the new Incident Management settings page in Project Settings to:

• Find out how to add these new fields to your incidents

• Turn on responder alerts for Responders and Affected Services

• Assign your Opsgenie responder alert priorities to Jira Service Management incident priorities

These features are automatically enabled for any new projects created in Jira Service Management.

Questions or Feedback?

If you have any questions or would like to provide us with some feedback, leave a comment on this post and we will respond to you as soon as possible.

[Jennifer Flinn]

Do these features require OpsGenie integration? Also, I assume that these new features are only applicable for Cloud instances of Jira Service Management and not for Data Center? Will we ever see any built-in features for incident management with Data Center?

[Nikki Zavadska [Appfire]]

Thi is great, can't wait to try it out! 👏

[Dan Brockwell]

@Jennifer Flinn Hey Jennifer! If you have a merged JSM Cloud instance, Opsgenie automatically comes as a part of the product, so these features will be available to all such customers. These features are not available as a part of Data Center at this stage; I'll follow up with our JSM Data Center team to see what their plans are for incident management enhancements.

[Jennifer Flinn]

Thank you @Dan Brockwell, it's much appreciated! We would love to hear more about anything coming for Data Center instances. It's always such a let down when a cool new feature is announced but there are no plans to enable for Data Center. 

[Antonio Biviano]

Fantastic to see some integration;

Is there any way to group tickets in ITSM utlising the teams field in Opsgenie.

Ideally I'd like to see the plan Team field linked with the Opsgenie Teams field.

Antonio

[Dan Brockwell]

Hey @Antonio Biviano, glad the integration will be useful to your team!

Currently, there's no way to group JSM tickets by the Opsgenie teams field.

However, integrating the Opsgenie 'team' concept into JSM is something our product team is starting to explore; feel free to email me on dbrockwell@atlassian.com if you're keen to chat further about it!

[Dan Brockwell]

@Jennifer Flinn Quick update on our thread of conversation.

At this point in time, we don’t currently have plans in the Data Center roadmap to enhance incident management capabilities.

Primarily, the team are focused on further integration of Insight asset management, resolving some SLA issues, bundling automation for Jira, and  shipping improvements to core request management workflows.

If you're interested, happy to put you in touch with the team owning this part of the product. Feel free to email me on dbrockwell@atlassian.com.

[Dan Brockwell]

@Nikki Zavadska [Appfire] Glad you're as excited as us! Keen to hear what you think :)

[Ken S]

Is this feature included in all JSM plans or just premium and above? 

[Dan Brockwell]

@Ken Szymanski available in all JSM plans! Here's how to add the responders field to your project: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/add-or-remove-the-responders-panel-from-your-service-project/

[Sunny Kyusu]

@Dan Brockwell I think it's wrong of Atlassian to release new features like this unless it's made available across all platforms, unless of course there are technical reasons why that can't happen. 

[Dan Brockwell]

@Sunny Kyusu I hear you, would understandably be frustrating for Server / Data Center customers. You hit the nail on the head; this decision is primarily down to technical reasons.

Our Server/DC and Cloud products have fundamentally different codebases and feature sets, so for the team owning Server/DC to rebuild similar functionality is quite complex and relies on underlying infrastructure that does not exist on those products.

If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out on dbrockwell@atlassian.com :)

[WasimBuden]

Hello Atlassian team, @Dan Brockwell 

Thank you for introducing this feature and trying to improve the user experience; I have a couple of questions and challenges and need clarity on this.

So, I am a Jira admin, and I have been waiting for these features for a long time as our project was deployed last year and had an old template; I enabled these features as soon as I got notified! But I have the below issues.

1. Whenever I open an Incident, I see this popup with a message posted below; refer to the screenshot too: 

Update incident
This Incident is missing some features. Update the Incident to use the responder's field, linked alerts, and more. Learn more about updating incidents.
Update incident

** Users are complaining about this, and one user wrote this feedback:

I hope you are having a great day, and thank you for your help in advance. For the past week or so, whenever I view a ticket in the Jira project "INC," I see a popup requesting to update the ticket to the new version. Can you update all the tickets in this project so that the popup goes away? It is eating seconds to close it. Not to mention it stays on the screen, impacting readability until it is closed. 

** So I followed the instructions on one of the tickets and tried to understand why this pops up on the screen for issues created after we enabled the features still says you need to update the ticket to use new features; this looks like a serious issue. What I have done so far:

I followed this article and have already tagged my request types to incidents / Ticket types :
Customize the types of incidents your project will use. These will appear in your project navigation under 'Incidents.'
Make these request types available in your customer portal by editing your
portal groups.
.

See attached screenshot for reference!

** Bigger problem, when I create a ticket using Opsgenie integration on my JSM project, the alert that triggered the Incident is not auto-linked, but the same issue key is auto-linked to Opsgenie alert under 'Extra properties,' but when I try to link the JSM ticket on Opsgenie it doesn't work! This means opsgenie is also not building that relationship.

So all the new 'Incident' created under my Incident, do I need to update all existing incidents to have new features enabled, and how can this work for all newly created 'Incident'

[Wilson Seow]

May I know if we could only add users with Jira Service Management application access as Responders? Could we add Jira Software users as part of the responders too? 

[Olli Suokas]

@Dan Brockwell Could you confirm what Wilson Seow asked, can we add any Jira user as a Responder or does that user has to have JSM product access?

Thanks!

[Jason Selby]

This is a really good feature, however it would be really handy if you could somehow edit the information in the alert to give you more specific information at first glance. Currently the alerts states the ref/Project ref then Incident raised. If the summary of the incident could be included in this alert it would reduce a number of clicks and give you exactly what you were looking for and allow you to prioritise...

[Jeyhun Gayibov]

@Dan Brockwell Hey, Thanks for introducing new features. Just spent half day trying to adopt this feature to create "Assignment Groups" (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-106) , but seems to be a bit different. 
Just wondering if there was any thinking done to address the topic from the link? If yes, any blogpost or best practice to check?

Bit of background: Trying to adopt JSM to be used in major events (Games, Expo, etc.). People are working on shifts so there are no way to do personal assignments. Usually 150-600 resolvers, 50-250 assignment groups. 

[WasimBuden]

We want to use Opsgenie, to page different team members whenever we have a P1-Critical Incident. To achieve this we need to activate 'Alerts' under the feature and 'responder alerts' under Incident management options.

Once done, Opsgenie automatically adds 'Assignee' as a 'Responder', and it pages each member when a ticket is assigned! The whole purpose of a paging tool is to automatically page/collaborate when there are outages but not on P3-P4 Incidents or Service requests!

[Wade H]

I love this feature and use it. One thing though is we cannot configure the alert in OpsGenie so we do not get the summary from the ticket nor are we able to configure other fields so the alert is pretty lacking on information. I would encourage everyone to go vote on this feature request:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/OPSGENIE-917

thanks, 
-wade

[Team Soporte b2b]

Hi team good afternoon, 
Question, when I create an incident in JSM Premium it generates an alert which is great, but I am needing to manually add the linked alert to the issue in JSM, is there a way to be able to do this like an automation?

Currently the responders are been added automatically which is great but not the alerts, and we are needing for this alerts to be added automatically. 

Thanks. 

[Gine Rosal]

I can no longer edit my member's roles in Opsgenie. Why is that?