Coming Soon: Insight Changing to Assets

[#1]

The 2020 acquisition of Mindville added powerful asset and configuration management capabilities to Jira Service Management in the form of Insight. Following the completion of that integration, customers have been able to access this functionality from the Insight button in the top navigation of the product.

Later this year, we will be renaming the asset and configuration management feature set in Jira Service Management from Insight to Assets. This change will take place across both Data Center and Cloud versions of our product.

Keep reading to learn about improvements to the user experience, interface, and the value of managing assets, CIs, services, and more with Jira Service Management.

What’s Changing With Assets?

The short answer: not too much! The full functionality of asset and configuration management from Insight will remain the same. We’re making this change to help customers more easily navigate our platform and better understand where to go for specific functionality.

The biggest difference you’ll see is the word “Assets” appearing in the top navigation where “Insight” used to reside. We’ll also be introducing a new object and schema view to better organize and present information related to assets, CIs, services, and more.

There are a handful of topics related to this change that also deserve a mention:

• IQL: Insight Query Language (IQL) will change its name to Asset Query Language (AQL). The functionality will remain the same and will be backwards compatible.

• APIs: No changes. Customers can continue to use them the way they do today. We will support both /Insight and /Assets.

• Apps: All existing Atlassian Insight Marketplace Apps will start referring to Assets.

In case you missed it…

We’ve been busy with a regular cadence of releases for asset and configuration management over the past few months:

• Improved accessibility and performance: Continuing enhancements to the UI and accessibility. Performance upgrades with better indexing and memory changes greatly improved search and import performance - and raised the object limit. Read more here.

• Import from URL: Enable admins who import CSV or JSON files to pull their data directly from a URL instead of manually creating and uploading files. Read more here.

• Jira users can now edit custom fields in Assets: Jira Software and Jira Work Management users can view and edit the contents of a custom field on an issue (providing they have edit permissions on the issue) without needing a Jira Service Management license. Read more here.

Stay tuned for more information and product updates around asset and configuration management capabilities in the coming months!

[Dirk Ronsmans]

Good change! Not the catchiest of names but it defines what it is!

At least people won't be confused anymore between Insight and Insights all the time :)

[David Sumlin]

With such generic functionality, it's hard to come up with a catchy name. I like Assets better than "Objects".

I can't wait for additional enhancements. IMO, the Mindville purchase (along with the Jira Automation purchase) was one of Atlassian's best strategic decisions in recent years. 

[David Berclaz _Apwide_]

That's great as it will avoid confusion.
We'll also have to rename our Timeline for Insight for Timeline for Assets ;-)

[Alessandro Rizzoli]

Ok, great news! 🎉But when the functionalities of Assets server will available on cloud? ;-) That would be my priority. 👍 Thanks! 🙏

[Nancy Freeman]

Assets is a decent name, certainly less confusing.   Will the discovery products name change too?  This was always very confusing "Insight" and "Insight Discovery".  

If you have any input on integrations - I would very much like an Integration from JSM Assets to Trello.   I maintain a "high level" application portfolio in JSM (Assets), and being able to bi-directionally update to/from a Trello board presenting the portfolio to the CIO would be "really, really" helpful 

Thank you

[jshippy]

I find the lack of integrations with Confluence disturbing.

[Kerli Loopman]

Great to see continual improvement. Can't wait to see a good backup solution and confluence integrations. :) 

[Luisa Benvenuto]

Good News! but about the functionalities? there's some other good news? :) 

[Daniel Triftshaeuser]

Really good change!

Makes talking about it with my clients way easier.

Looking forward to integration improvements with the rest of the Atlassian tool suite.

[Haddon Fisher]

In the immortal words of Prince John..."it's a good change".

[Stefanie Sullivan]

When is the Azure integration coming?

[Gabriel Genest]

Ok, new name, but is there any updates on the long awaited cloud integrations?

[Mayur Jadhav]

Great!! Now it will be easy to navigate. @Grady Gausman  When Atlassian is planning to release the AWS integration ?

[Sergei Gridnevskii]

I was expecting to read something terrible in the article because we use Insight intensively and some of the data we store there is critical. Thankfully they only changed name :)

What I expect from atlassian is to make one button backup and restore for object type, maybe using git. We are currently using custom scripts for that.

[Bart Brandt]

Does have assets also an automatic backup functionality?

[Nick Dring]

I'd love to be able to use Insight, but at the moment it just doesn't have the functionality it needs to make it useful. I described how I'd like to use Insight with Automation here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-Integrations/Using-Insight-and-Automation/qaq-p/2008024 

When it is possible to do things like this, I'll look at it again.

[František Špaček _MoroSystems_]

Good change but when will finally Insight... err Assets get some love? So much bugs around, less functionality than DC, much less support for interaction through API (missing .asUser() interaction, hard interactions from outside world like Jira SM portal, really bad UX designed insight customfields on new issue view and so on).

[Sergei Gridnevskii]

František it is much better now than it was 1 year ago. UX is terrible, but it works fast. JSM integration is good, Automation for Jira has API for Insight. I have not tried REST API yet, but am finishing 2 projects with Insight (Access rights Audit and Assets management) and so far so good.

[Girish_Shenoy]

Good one! Was looking forward for few more new feature announcement to deal with competitors like Manage Engine, reporting, license compliance etc.

[Ulrich Kamp]

Exactely @Sergei Gridnevskiibasically a perfect approach for Jira and very fast progress in the first years, when it came from Riada or Midville, but in the last two years it looks sometimes like a forgotten product.

Hopefully it will change now and get back to the former level.

[František Špaček _MoroSystems_]

@Sergei Gridnevskiiare we talking about same Insight? The same one which is impossible to use on some instances in combination with Automation where reading values from Insight randomly fails? Or really bad support from portal side? Even if it is mainly JSM plugin? Take a look on all extensions for JSM portal, literally zero of them support Insight fields. Same with JXL or other plugins who summarize, search and report issues - support for Insight custom fields is non-existent and every single vendor reffers to missing API (e.g. not unable to interfere with Insight in your name and rather always forced to use service account which is basically a security breach). Not talking about missing import types from server/DC (like LDAP connector, Insight is really the only place where we have been able to successfully handle orgnization structure, managers and use it for Approval process). Lots of other missing functionlalities too (not new ones just missing ones which are available for on-premise variant).

Insight (now Assets) has maybe biggest unfulfilled potential from most of the Atlassian family of products as it can store literally anything and often used as middle database for lots of processes (or at least it was for on-premise). Before Atlassian bought it, it was easily best plugin for Jira and one of the fastest progressing one. It sadly lost its momentum when it was incorporated into JSM and while some good changes came past few months (like JSW and JWM users able to pick values in Insight fields) it is still more or less the functionality we had before and is just non existant in cloud.

[Marko Isola]

Who cares about the name if it breaks functionality.

I have dropdown list in Issue create screen from which a user can select an object from INSIGHT schema. In Configure Assets Custom Field I have added three attributes to be shown in Issue itself after creation (Object attributes on Issue view). 

This worked fine until I upgraded from 8.22.3 to 9.3.0 (test environment ofc before going live). Now it shows all attributes that has value in them of the selected object. Doesn't matter if I've selected one, three or whatnot attributes.

Running Datacenter version on-prem. Upgrade went without problems. Re-indexing has been done.

[Sunny Kyusu]

Thanks for the info. I'm new here and was wondering if now is the time for Assets to have it's own community product group here in the community? Apologies if there is one - I couldn't spot it and posted my first question in the Jira Service Management forum. I didn't get a response. Browsing around there is little reference to Assets. Here Bridget posted about the community video library, over 100 videos and nothing about Assets. This is in line with what I have found generally with support and training being thin on the ground, although there are 2 courses in the Atlassian University which is good to see. 

Some people have commented that the product looks to have lost momentum, as well as various issues with functionality. We are testing it in our own (Datacenter/airgapped/high security) environment but are now nervous about going forward with it and are looking at competing products. 

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

Will you share a release notes of Assets app for DC ? :)