With the question “Ready to amp up your ITSM?” Atlassian has presented the rebranding of Jira Service Desk, making it clear that (new) “Jira Service Management” (JSM) should be much more than just a new name.

Rather, it is about a realignment and greater focus on the IT service management market. Until now, the focus has been on service desks and help centers to enable help seekers to get started quickly and to provide external users with access without additional licenses. With this use case alone, Atlassian has found many customers and had them certified by ITIL. For example, we at Swarmit have successfully supported several customers with the installation, configuration and go-live of such implementations.

What's new?

Atlassian has also provided a set of issue types and workflow in the past in order to be able to use the existing functionalities for use in incident, change & demand management. Although this collection was available free of charge via the marketplace, it was not natively integrated into the creation of JIRA projects. This will change in the future, as Atlassian wants to strengthen its focus on ITSM and support the use of Jira as a core element. The additional project templates also come with workflow templates which are thematically tailored.

The aspect of incident management should be the integration of Opsgenie continue to support. Since Opsgenie was purchased by Atlassian, it was available as part of the Atlassian stack as a separate cloud application. In addition to on-call planning, alerts and “incident swarming,” other popular Opsgenie services are now being integrated into all cloud variants of JSM.

On the way to the ITSM suite, “Insight - Asset Management” is also being integrated into Jira Service Management. As the name suggests, Insight primarily offers asset management functions. However, it can be used, for example, to manage configuration items (CIs) and set up a configuration management database (CMDB). As key features, Insight has various tool integrations (cloud technologies such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure) and offers the option of comparing CIs via a network scan. While the app was previously available separately in the Marketplace, since the acquisition of Mindville at the beginning of 2020, it has been directly owned by Atlassian and will no longer be available independently in the future.

Even the third purchase from Atlassian, “Halp” will soon be included in the service management package, because the keyword “conversational ticketing” means efforts to integrate various chat applications (Slack, Teams, etc.) much better into Jira tickets.

When are the new features coming?

As far as we know, Atlassian will not distribute the mentioned features in their entirety. While the project and workflow templates were already available on cloud instances directly or a few days after the announcement, data center customers will unfortunately not receive them.

Opsgenie integration is also already available for cloud products, while servers and data center customers must wait for one of the next updates.

The integration of Insight is announced for Cloud Premium and Data Center customers at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The “conversational ticketing” features should start with Slack in Q1 2021. (Microsoft Teams is listed on the roadmap)

With the Announcing the “end-of-life” of server products, Atlassian's focus is clearly on cloud and data centers. This also makes it difficult to find information about the new features for server instances. However, there should be a new version (possibly 4.14) for servers and data centers before the end of the year.

What if Jira Service Desk is already in use?

For current Service Desk customers, nothing will change for now. The new features are delivered as described above and should have no effect on existing setups.

For Service Desk and Opsgenie customers, Atlassian offers a strategy for combining the two licenses, but this is not mandatory as Opsgenie will continue to be used as a standalone application.

With Jira Service Management, the categories for cloud are now based on the setup of the other Atlassian products. This means that there are now Free, Standard, Premium and Enterprise levels. These are being handled as new editions. While the adjusted prices already apply for new customers, Atlassian will honor the prices for existing customers for another 12 months.

How can I build or supplement an ITSM suite with Atlassian products?

In addition to the classic Jira functionalities, Jira Service Management not only offers a strong customer portal and approval mechanisms at ticket level, but thanks to the integrations of Insight and Opsgenie, it also covers previously unavailable ITSM topics (asset management, service catalogue management, etc.) without additional apps.

Will then Confluence as a knowledge database and documentation platform, and Statuspage used as a monitoring and communication tool, can be used with Bitbucket As source code management, the image of an ITSM suite can be further completed.

Why are we starting a new era with the well-known topic of ITSM?

Of course, IT service management is not a new topic, with Atlassian's orientation as a “cloud-first” company, but a value proposition is being made to make all services available in the cloud unconditionally.

Today, the cloud variants of Atlassian are functionally equivalent or even slightly ahead of server or data center products, making the cloud an attractive destination for an ITSM suite.

How can Swarmit help implement Jira Service Management?

While we have successfully used Jira Service Desk projects for customers several times, we are looking forward to further projects in the ITSM environment, including the implementation of a comprehensive ITSM suite based on Atlassian Services.

In addition to service desk projects with change and incident management, we were also able to successfully use Opsgenie with alert integration from, among others, Dynatrace and NewRelic. According to their own statements, our customers were able to significantly reduce their false-positive Pickett calls.

Regardless of whether it's change, incident, demand or release management, our certified consultants will help you set up services to suit your organization's processes and integrate them into your existing Jira landscape.

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