JQL to check for Internal Comment as last comment

[Nicholas Frain]

In my business, one bad habit our agents get into is to continually add internal comments.

Over a period of time it can get to a stage where a ticket may have many updates; however, a customer is not being kept informed.

Is there some JQL i could use in a filter to show which tickets have an Internal Note as the most recent comment?

I have tried to check various forums/google, but i am not finding a straight-forward answer.

Thank you in anticipation of your response.

Nicholas

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Nicholas Frain , natively there isn't a JQL function for querying internal vs. external. An addon like Scriptrunner would allow this. However, maybe you Should attempt to address the larger issue here. You are trying to ensure that customer issues receive the proper attention, correct? Assuming so there are solutions using automation and SLAs that address this. Would that be a desirable solution here?  I don't believe having a lot of internal comments is indicative of a problem that needs to be addressed personally.

[Nicholas Frain]

Hi Jack

Thanks for responding, appreciate it.

It sounds more like i need to address the root cause, which is analyst behaviour.

It has become an automatic go-to approach, where a technical agent can place their thoughts on the issue, this often includes sensitive information about our software, which we wouldn't wish to divulge.

The only problem is, nobody goes to the next step of sanitizing it into a customer friendly message.

My initial query was in the hope we could do something that would assist the Service Desk in identifying which tickets required their attention.

There are so many improvements that can be made within the Jira Service Management toolset, i'm quite astounded to see its limitations.

Thanks again,

Nicholas

[Jack Brickey]

Thi @Nicholas Frain , indeed, the first thing to address is establishing a workflow and training your agents to follow this workflow. If you intend to support your customers and use a tool like JSM to do so then it is really important to ensure that the team leverages it appropriately. There are functions within the tool that you could employ to ensure that agents don't forget to respond to customers. Specifically, you can use SLAs and automation to ensure your agents are reminded to contact the customer. Best of luck!

[Marc Isikoff]

Do not believe the marketplace pushers - ugh!

{{triggerissue.comments.last.internal}} will get you the last internal comment.

[Jack Brickey]

If you refer to me here @Marc Isikoff , I do apologize if my response was seen as pushing apps. That was not and is never my intention. Actually, I rarely use addon apps at all. I only offer options to the community based on experience and knowledge.

that aside , thank you for sharing your knowledge here. However, I may be mistaken but I think the smartvalue will simply return the last internal comment. I believe Nicholas was wanting to create a filter to return a list of all issues where the last comment was internal. I will have to play with this if I get time to see if I can create a rule using lookupIssues and the offered smartvalue to ultimately send an email with the results. If you have the details of such solution (or similar) please do share it here to benefit all.

cheers!

[Marc Isikoff]

Jack, no offense taken and certainly was not pointing you out at all.

I believe 50% of the issue is finding what is the latest internal comment -- which I supplied -- then the other 50% is comparing that to the latest comment to know.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I feel your pain, it's really frustrating that your agents don't understand the difference between an internal conversation and talking with the customer.

I'm afraid there are no ways to search for comments that are internal or external.

[Jack Brickey]

Nic, can you confirm whether Scriptrunner would help here? I thought I had seen where this was the case but could certainly be mistaken.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

On server/DC, you could write a Scriptrunner JQL function that could search for issues with internal or external comments.  You could also write a scripted field that could return the numbers of both.

On Cloud, I think the only option would be to script a field that counted them, but I'm not entirely sure that it is possible, as I don't think the REST APIs expose them!

[Nicholas Frain]

Thanks for your post, Nic. Yes, it's a painful exercise. All human driven, but i was kind of hoping JSM could have helped me manage it a bit easier.

Jira Service Management does not make its adoption straight-forward, does it.

Thanks again, appreciate it

Nicholas

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I did'nt really want to call it out directly, but yes, the problem is more about your analyst behaviour.  They need to be thinking of which audience they want for their comments every time they post (probably meaning talking to the customer a bit more!). 

Jira does make it very easy to do internal comments only though, and as a default, so I can not put the blame on your agents!

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Nicholas Frain

if you are open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, this would be easy to do using the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of so-called smart columns that aren’t natively available, including the last comment visibility (along with many other comment-related columns).

This is how it looks in action:

As you can see above, you can easily sort and filter by the last comment visibility, and also use it across JXL's advanced features, such as support for (configurable) issue hierarchies, issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting. Note that all of this just works - so there's no automation or scripting whatsoever required!

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

[Alisa Zamaraeva]

Hi @Nicholas Frain 

Not really a straight-forward solution, but you can try using some automation rules.

Every time new comment is added, check if the comment is internal, and edit some select list custom field to a certain value. Then you'll be able to use this custom field in a jql filter. 

The other possible solution to get the list of issues is even less convenient, you can set up a rule that would regularly collect such issues, write it to the audit log, and add comment mentioning agent etc. The log is accessible only in Automation section inside project settings. 

See the examples in the screenshots below.

Hope this helps,

Alisa