Jira Service Management is here - and it means it to you

On November 9th, 2020 Atlassian announced to rename their product “Jira Service Desk”. With the new name “Jira Service Management” there is a content reorientation as well as some new features. We looked at what changes and how quickly the changes are delivered to the cloud, server and data center.

With the question "Ready to amp up your ITSM?" Atlassian presented the re-branding of Jira Service Desk, making it clear that “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. So far, the focus has been on service desks and help centers to enable those looking for help to get started quickly and to provide access to external users without additional licenses. Atlassian already found many customers with this use case and had them certified by ITIL. We at Swarmit have successfully supported some customers with the installation, configuration and go-live of such implementations.

Jira Service Management Logo

What's new?

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

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

On the way to the ITSM suite, “Insight - Asset Management” will also be integrated into Jira Service Management. As the name suggests, Insight primarily offers asset management functions. It can be used, for example, to manage configuration items (CIs) and to set up a configuration management database (CMDB). As key features, Insight brings with it 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, it has belonged directly to Atlassian since Mindville was acquired in early 2020 and will no longer be available separately in the future.

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

When will the new features come?

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.

The Opsgenie integration is already available for the cloud products, while server and data center customers have to wait for one of the next updates.

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

With the Announcement of the “end-of-life” of server products, Atlassian's focus is clearly on the cloud and data center. The information on the new features for server instances is also difficult to find. Before the end of the year, however, there should be a new version (possibly 4.14) for servers and data centers.

Opsgenie logo

What if Jira Service Desk is already in use?

For the time being, nothing will change for current Service Desk customers. The new features are delivered as described above and should not have any influence 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 available as a standalone application.

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

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

In addition to the classic Jira functionalities, Jira Service Management not only includes a strong customer portal and approval mechanisms at ticket level, but thanks to the integration of Insight and Opsgenie, ITSM topics (asset management, service catalog management, etc.) that were previously unavailable are also included .) covered without additional apps.

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

ITSM diagram

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

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

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

How can Swarmit help with the implementation of Jira Service Management?

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

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

Regardless of whether it is change, incident, demand or release management, our certified consultants support you in setting up the services to match the processes of your organization and integration into your existing Jira landscape.

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