Next level incident management in Jira Service Management

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community!

We’re thrilled to announce some exciting changes to incident management in Jira Service Management Cloud, in order to give your teams extra muscle during incidents, and learn from incident causes and patterns to prevent future incidents.

You will see these changes become available in your instance in the coming 2-4 weeks. Some will automatically appear and some will need to be turned on by an admin in the Incident management tab under Project Settings.

Please note, all incidents that originate in Jira Service Management will now be managed in your Incident queue. The Major Incidents section that pulls incidents from Opsgenie and currently exists below your queues in Jira Service Management will be removed from your instance. We have also removed the “Create major incident” button from the top of the issue view and moved it to the Details section on the right side of your Jira Service Management issue view screen as a toggle.

To continue managing Opsgenie incidents, you will need to sign in to Opsgenie.

Mark incidents as major incidents

Now, you can mark any Jira Service Management incident as a major incident, not just incidents pulled from Opsgenie. Escalate any incident and increase its visibility to your teams. Learn more about major incidents.

Create and send updates to a Slack channel directly from an incident

Connect your workspace and create a dedicated Slack channel for each incident. Reduce switching between tools to communicate while analyzing and resolving incidents. You can now find this functionality under Details on the right side of your Jira Service Management issue view. Learn how to connect a Slack workspace to your service project.

Send updates to internal stakeholders

Internal stakeholders are people who are not responders but need to be updated about the incident’s progress to take precautions and actions. Add people as stakeholders and update them by sending email messages. You can now find the functionality under Details on the right side of your Jira Service Management issue view. Learn how to add and manage internal stakeholders. 

Investigate changes to find potential incident causes

Connect your CI/CD tools to track code changes on affected services. You can mark deployments and commits as potential causes of the incident. This will help you identify the problem causing the incident and shorten your resolution time significantly. You can now access this right from the Jira Service Management issue view. Learn more about the incident investigation view feature.

Swarm incidents with your team through Conference calls

Create conference rooms to coordinate and manage incidents from a central place. Invite your team members directly to the call. You can now find this functionality under Details on the right side of your Jira Service Management issue view. Learn how to use the conference call feature.

Learn from incidents with Post-incident reviews (PIRs)

Review what happened during the incident and start remediation by understanding what caused the problem. Create long-term solutions to problems leading up to an incident and link the post-incident review to the incident. You can now view PIRs from the side navigation in your ITSM projects once it has been turned on in your Project Settings. Learn more about post-incident reviews.

What’s coming up next?

Over the coming months, we’ll continue to enhance the incident management experience in Jira Service Management.

Enhanced Post-incident review (PIR) capabilities

Make compiling and sharing post-incident reviews easier with PIR templates and auto-population of incident data, and exporting PIRs to Confluence.

Create Jira Service Management incidents from Opsgenie alerts

Create a Jira incident from an alert within Jira Service Management, and set up automatic rules to create incidents based on pre-defined alert criteria.

Launch Zoom calls directly from incidents

Soon, you’ll be able to create and join Zoom calls with your incident response team directly from all Jira Service Management incidents.

Enhanced activity feed capabilities

Create manual activity feed entries at custom times to capture incident actions and updates, and provide a more complete source of truth for post-incident reviews.

If you have any feedback or suggestions about these improvements for incidents, drop a comment below!

[Gary Blower (Clearvision)]

These changes are clearly a step to bring the Opsgenie functionality into JSM, but you have already removed the ability to link Jira issues to Opsgenie Major incidents from the issue and queue view, which was a key feature of incident management in JSM. As incident rules (creating major incidents from alerts) is not yet available this was a premature move and leaves the experience worse as now you have to switch to the Opsgenie incident (via a convoluted route) to link it to one or more JSM issues.

[Muhammad Fahad]

Great stuff @Dan Brockwell ! One step towards improved incident management. Looking forward to testing it.

I hope stakeholder management will be available in JSM Premium (at the moment Opsgenie just says "Stakeholder role is not available for your plan."... It's only part of Opsgenie Enterprise) as part of ITOM. 

[Dan Brockwell]

@Gary Blower (Clearvision) 

Hey Gary! Appreciate you taking the time to leave feedback. Definitely hear you on the points above, and it was a concern we specifically evaluated as a team before release. Ultimately, we made the call that it was not a blocker to the transition for 3 key reasons:

1. Customers can currently link Opsgenie alerts to any Jira Service Management incidents (https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-linked-alerts/) and mark those Jira Service Management incidents as major (https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-major-incidents/), meaning a ‘major incident’ can be linked to an alert entirely within the JSM UI.

2. Keeping the old Opsgenie incident queue inside JSM whilst introducing a new ‘major incident’ concept would create a lot of confusion around two different types of ‘major incidents’, especially for new customers.

3. Only a small % of teams were using the UI in JSM to create and link Opsgenie incidents to JSM incidents, and so despite some friction, on the whole, we thought it was the right thing to do by the broader customer base. We still have the Incident section available in Opsgenie for the small subset of customers for whom the ability to create incidents directly from alerts would be a blocker to transition.

Would love to better understand how you folks approach the major incident management process and how this impacts your team. Shoot me an email on dbrockwell@atlassian.com and would be happy to chat further + hear what you’d like to see in the upcoming feature to create JSM incidents from Opsgenie alerts

[Gary Blower (Clearvision)]

Hi Dan. Thanks for update. I'm working with a couple of clients on this functionality at the moment, so I'll gather feedback and get back to you directly in the new year. I think once the full Inc Man capability that is in Opsgenie is available in JSM it will be less of an issue: especially the incident rules (automation from alert to incident) .

[Jan Odvárka]

I really appreciate how atlassian consolidate their services, It would be really great if we could be informed what is planned with jam and opsgenie. I am not speaking about cloud roadmap, which is just like list of new stuff, but I am missing overall picture. What about MS teams chat integration instead of slack for example?

[Jeff Guthrie]

I agree with Gary.  We have rules built in Opsgenie to page our oncall staff when a new Opsgenie incident is created.  We trained our DevOps to click on the Create Major Incident, this would create the incident in Opsgenie and trigger the paging rules.  Now we have a toggle that no longer triggers these rules in Opsgenie and no direction on how to recreate this functionality.  1 step forward, 5 steps back.

[vaibhav.singh]

Hi @Dan Brockwell 

Can't seem to be able to add Stakeholders when I click 'manage' on an incident ticket. Is it not connected to the jira directory?

Am I missing something here?

Thanks.

[Punit Bhansali]

@Jan Odvárka 

Hey Jan,

We are in the process of implementing all the Incident Management related capabilities in JSM to bring in collaboration among teams for reducing 'Time to Respond' to an Incident. Meanwhile, we are also trying to enhance Opsgenie functionalities to support all our users.

Please follow our Quarterly updates to track feature enhancements and new functionalities added to further improve the overall Incident Management experience.

[Punit Bhansali]

@Jeff Guthrie 

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for providing valuable feedback.

With the introduction of these new features in JSM, we haven't taken back any of the Opsgenie functionalities. You can still create an Incident directly in Opsgenie which will trigger your paging rules as earlier.

With this update, we have additionally provided a lot of functionalities in JSM too which wont require you to juggle between JSM and Opsgenie for using features like  Slack Integration or to communicate with the Stakeholders or notifying the Responders. In the next phase we will definitely look into bringing more capabilities in JSM, essential to Incident Management.

Hope this will help.

Further, please feel free to shoot an Email at pbhansali@atlassian.com for providing feedback on how we can improve the overall Incident Management experience for your team.

[Punit Bhansali]

@vaibhav_singh 

Hey Vaibhav,

With the newly launched 'Stakeholder Communication' feature, you can add any user as 'Stakeholder' for an Incident issue raised, who is a member of the Project  who has a JSM license.

Hope this helps. Please, let us know if the issue still persists.

[Jeff Guthrie]

@Punit Bhansali 

Could you please direct me to the updated documentation that shows how to set this up?  We did not see any in the release notes provided or the links provided.  Our developers were unable to find this either.  It wasn't until they opened tickets with Atlassian that they were able to get the information they needed.

[George]

@Punit Bhansali You answers to @vaibhav_singh doesn't solve the issue. We have the exact same issue. Stakeholders are added to the project already.

[Punit Bhansali]

@George  Can you please send us more details like User ID @pbhansali@atlassian.com to further investigate this case. We will double check with our Development team.

However, as a rule of thumb, any user with JSM license (JSM and Opsgenie license) can be added as Stakeholder. 

[vaibhav.singh]

@Punit Bhansali 

So just to clarify you need to have an Opsgenie license as well or or just a JSM would do?

I can confirm that we can not still add stakeholders as recommended.

Thanks.

[WasimBuden]

Hello Atlassian team,

This new feature has caused a lot of issues/unrest rather than solving some!, below are the concerns, and we need to get this fixed / clarity.

Timelines: On the old option, timelines were automatically captured as Incident Opened, Responder added, Responder alert acked, Slack channel created, stakeholder added, stakeholder updated, ICC session-when someone joined/left the call as these are critical timelines events that need to be captured, so how do we capture these on the changed instance?

Stakeholder updates: How do we send external stakeholder updates? If we have to notify customers of the progress?

Timings: How do we capture, Created at, Updated at, Impact started at, Impact ended at, Impact detected at, ELAPSED TIME as these are very different from the actual Incident create, update and resolve timings. Resolve issue: Automatically calculated - Impact Duration on OG.

New fields: As new fields are significant to manage Critical/P1 Incidents, how do we get it to one-view or under one section avoiding our Incident managers to chase/search for these as we have so many other fields and we can't even PIN these fields.

Post-incident analysis report: How can we run PIR directly from the Incident on OG? Also, we had timelines, COMMAND CENTER SESSIONS recorded, slack channel info, and related Incident details tagged. OG also gave us a PIR report in a PDF format with time durations like time to resolve, Incident Duration, Time to respond, stakeholders notified? And not to forget an option to export this to Confluence!

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P.S: Our daily operations are broken, how do we roll back to 'Create Major Incident'!

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Ticket: https://getsupport.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/48/PCS-73963

Regards,
Wasim

[Punit Bhansali]

Hey @Jeff Guthrie ,

You can still create Incidents in Opsgenie and it will in return trigger your paging rules as before. All you will need is to switch to/open Opsgenie app and create Incident as stated here: https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/manually-create-an-incident/ 

Also, please find the latest document on updated 'Major Incident' functionality here: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-major-incidents/

Please feel free to reach out to us for any further clarification.

[Punit Bhansali]

Hey @vaibhav_singh ,

Any user with a JSM license can be added as 'Stakeholder'.

If you are still facing any issue please reach out to our Support team and we will look into it & resolve it at the earliest. You can also shoot an email to pbhansali@atlassian.com for any further clarification.

[WasimBuden]

So you expect 10,000 customers to have a licensee just to receive an email notification!

[Thomas Laberge]

We also loose all integration with status page. Missing a lot of feature with the missing create major incident. Having the possibility to add stakeholder without a jsm licence would also solve the problem and avoid moving to opsgenie to create a manuel incident. At least prenium jsm should be able to have unlimted stakeholder to receive a simple mail notification.

[Shaun Pinney]

@WasimBuden 

Thank you for taking the time to communicate your issues, I understand it’s frustrating when things move and/or don’t match the workflows you already have in place. I collaborated with my colleagues @Yuri Moura (who I believe also replied to your Jira ticket) and @Punit Bhansali to provide some helpful workarounds to help you get on track - including a video Yuri made.

Timelines:
Those events should be available in the activity feed of the Major Incident, with exception of ICC session activity, ICC participant activity, Integrations, and Slack messages. More information at New Feature Announcement: Filter your incident activity feed in Jira Service Management Cloud

Stakeholder updates:
You should be able to manage the stakeholders of a Major Incident on your Agent View and update them using the Inform Stakeholder feature that is in the comment section. 

Timings:
Unfortunately, this is not available yet in the Incident Management for Jira Service Management, but it is already on our product roadmap.

New fields:
You can update your Incident Request Types and move these new fields as you need, you can even move some of them to the Description Section as shown below. This will give more visibility to them.

Post-incident analysis report:
I agree there is a lot of room for improvement at the current PIR available for Jira Service Management and I can assure you our team is working on this for the future.

*Workaround:
In this case, I would suggest you create a JSM integration in Opsgenie to raise alerts and incidents from your Jira Service Management incidents, this way you can stop using the Major Incident feature until is improved enough to cover all the scenarios you mentioned and go back to use Opsgenie as your main Incident Management tool.

Watch video

*Note: This workaround will only work for customers that have JSM Premium or Opsgenie Standard/Enterprise since some of the features will not be available in the other plans.

Customers can create an integration between Jira and Opsgenie, which will give them the ability to create alerts in Opsgenie when certain events happen in Jira. With that, they can create incident rules to generate Incidents from the Alerts created through the integration. Knowing that, to “replace” the button to create the Major Incident they can add a label to their incident request in JSM, that will generate an alert, that will raise an incident. This way, they can still manage their incident in Opsgenie instead of JSM

Please let us know if this additional info is helpful.

[John Munday]

Am I right in thinking that, because of these changes, Incidents created in Opsgenie are now invisible to service desk teams? @Dan Brockwell I would really like to understand the concept behind "two different types of ‘major incidents’".  Is it not possible for JSM customers to decide to stick with Opsgenie major incidents or JSM major incidents or indeed both through the feature selection.  These changes seem to force customers into new ways of working whilst removing features they are already using.

[Beatrice Glienke]

Hi there,

Stakeholders by definition are not agents with a JSM license.

These can be upper management, or whole departments affected by an incident.

So I would need licensed free customers to be able to be added + Outlook Distributions Lists

+ Jira Groups.

By the way: the major incident toggle does not work yet, I already opened a Support Ticket.

I am a bit disappointed that you release such things in such a poor quality.

I am looking  forward to these really promising looking new features once they work out.

Best,

Beatrice

[Rob LaRose]

@Punit Bhansali we're implementing JSM + OpsGenie now .. trying to do it the rightest / most forward-compatible way.  We're stumbling over a couple of things and unclear what's COMING vs. what's GOING from the whole operation.

It feels like OpsGenie "Incidents" are on their way out and should not be implemented as a new setup. 

The new OpsGenie+JSM integration feels like the new plan, but there are a couple of features that don't seem to have made it over to the new integration yet:

1) We can create a slack channel for a JSM incident issue, but there doesn't appear to be a way to send remarks from the slack channel back to the JSM ticket.  The slack+jsm integration has a "send this to jsm" button but it doesn't seem to work.  Maybe it's a legacy plug-in?

2) There doesn't appear to be a way to associate a Service with an Alert in OpsGenie.  I can attach a service when a JSM ticket is created first, and the "id" of that service is included in the OpsGenie alert created by the integration, but the ID is not descriptive (it's a string of numbers).  But I cannot attach a service when the OpsGenie Alert comes first.

And then there are Responder Alerts from JSM tickets which appear to create a whole special type of Alert with some of the old OpsGenie incident features built into it, but no configuration options to make those alerts clear or actionable.

Think you can help us get some clarity on this?

[Kaul, Divya]

Hello Atlassian Team,

Would like to have your thoughts on the points below:-

• With the new changes, I'm wondering what stopped us from offering the Chat Channel integration with Microsoft teams? I'm just seeing options for Slack. Is this something that would be coming soon? We would like to have the chat channel option, to be able to start a call for all major incidents in Teams and not Slack and then have the conversation reference available in the ticket once this integration is setup.
•  Another thing that's concerning, was that the JSM incident no longer shows up under Opsgenie. That actually hampers a lot, as the Opsgenie API integration and documentation appears to work better than JSM's. Shouldn't we make sure that the incident created; whether in Opsgenie or in JSM should be available in both locations? Else the Opsgenie Analytics would never be able to use the data. With JSM, we would have to look at using external integrations, pull some data from JSM, some from Opsgenie, making it difficult to have all fields in one place for reporting. Please let us know your thoughts, because we would like to be aligned on what could be coming, to avoid spending time on building integrations that wouldn't work, if things are moved off Opsgenie.
• Is there a way to automate enablement of the major incident toggle using the priority field in an incident or a similar condition?

[Rudy Holtkamp]

Hi @Dan Brockwell @Shaun Pinney @Punit Bhansali 

Is there a REST API endpoint to add responders to an incident in JSM?

I need to add the correct team to an incident via automation and Insight.