With JIRA as a Helpdesk, what's a good way to track changes to servers?

[Mike]

Everytime someone does work on a server we'd like for it to be logged in JIRA so that a change history is clearly visible in one location for each server. We don't want to open a new ticket everytime someone makes a change. We're not sure about what the best way is to go about it and only came up with one idea so far:

Simply create a project for the servers, maybe create a specific workflow for the project, and then open tickets for each server. As changes are made, update each server's ticket but don't create a new one.

Beyond that simple context we haven't really had any other bright ideas.

[Radu Dumitriu]

2 cents: your approach means that in time your history will be very huge. Especially if you have lots of updates I would advise against it.

I guess it is more important to have the current config than the history so I would place all this info in the database (max 3 tables: [serverid, status, name] [serverid, property, value] [maybe: history table] ) and I would integrate that in jira so that when the admins resolve a task, it will automatically update the values.

Then you can harvest the database in some way, maybe with a little java application or even directly from excel, I don't know ...

For Jira, there are good plugins to help you on the way.

Just an opinion.

[Mike]

Pointing out the eventual size of a ticket was helpful and I do like the idea of storing history in separate database tables. The downside is that there is development required. It's not a blocker, but we're on the hunt for simple solutions.

[Radu Dumitriu]

I know it will sound like sales, but we did much complicated things with these:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keplerrominfo.jira.plugins.jjupin (paid)

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.keplerrominfo.jira.plugins.databasecf (free)

If you do not like the idea to pay, you can try Groovy (Jamie's ScriptRunner) instead of JJupin. There are plenty of options ....