Jira Service Desk Administrator counted as Agent?

[Ryan Yam]

Hi, I currently want to maximize our agent count for small teams (3). However, I noticed that the administrator account I used to register our group is counted against agents.

I really don't plan to have my admin account work on tickets but rather configure the system. Is there a way I can keep myself as an administrator to free up 1 agent slot who will work on the service desk tickets?

[Tarun Sapra]

Is the admin account part of the  "Service Desk Team" project role which might be the reason the account is counted towards the agent license.

From the docs

Global permissions

At installation time, JIRA Service Desk creates a global permission named JIRA Service Desk agent access. If agent based pricing is enabled for the instance, users who require access to agent views or functionality need to have this permission. The number of users who are granted this permission determines how many agent licenses are used on the system.

Manage agents

Add agents to a project

By default, project administrators can add agents from other projects to the project. JIRA administrators can add anyone to the project.

To add agents, click Add team () in the project sidebar. The agents are emailed a link to the service desk project, and are added to the Service Desk Team project role in Project settings > Users and groups.

When a JIRA administrator adds a new agent to the project, then the agent is also assigned a JIRA Service Desk license and added to the service-desk-users license group in  > User Management.

If your agents need to collaborate with JIRA Core or JIRA Software users to resolve an issue, you can grant the JIRA users limited access to your service desk project

[Ryan Yam]

In this case, is it possible to have an administrative/owner role who can manage the service desk project/configuration but not be part of the "Service Desk Team" that counts towards licenses?

[Tarun Sapra]

As stated in the docs

"By default, project administrators can add agents from other projects to the project. JIRA administrators can add anyone to the project."

Thus, if you have project administration permission then you can add other users as agents and it definitely doesn't mean that your own admin account will be counted towards agent license. 

[Shane Starcher]

@Tarun Sapra looks like your answer is only partially correct.  I removed the Admin group from "Service Desk Agent" permissions group for the project which removed the admins as agents as hoping, but now everytime I'm in Jira I get the following error.

This service desk project has configuration problems and may not work as expected.

[Alexandre Nietupski]

What I did was putting the "site-admin" group as Client, simply. Did not brake the project, as far as I could see. This is just inconvenient since, in my case, it would be important to grant to administrators the ability to edit the request templates, which seems to be reserved to Agents.