It’s been said that agility comes with awareness. When it comes to IT support, it means acting rapidly when necessary. An agile IT team is flexible. They can anticipate or quickly adapt to changing situations and improvise when faced with obstacles.

When urgent issues come in, they need fast answers. Often, managers aren’t notified right away, resulting in lost time. Other times, domain experts need to get involved and aren’t quickly reachable. Beyond just critical tickets, IT managers have a hard time leaving the office because doing so means going blind to support activity.

How can an IT team react quickly to problems, involve the right experts, and stay updated in real-time?

Watch the webinar

Join two IT managers as they share their secrets to success with Atlassian tools (Jira, Hipchat, and Jira Service Desk). Dave Wehr (Magview) and Andy Fleming (Halogenics) discuss how they overcame these challenges by adding Hipchat to their service desk, enabling faster and more agile service.

What we cover

Our panel of IT professionals will go over how to:

  • Solve problems in real-time. Learn how Hipchat enables agents and experts to collaborate so they can resolve tickets faster. Waiting for tickets to bounce around multiple queues is a workflow of the past.
  • Never miss a critical update. Managers can easily stay on top of progress and get notified anytime anything important happens, or a ticket’s status changes.
  • Keep your whole team in the loop. Monitor important tickets and be the first to know when a blocker gets solved, all from your real-time chat stream.
  • Service without the desk. With Hipchat on your phone, learn how to keep your finger on the pulse of support tickets, your team, and more.

Speakers

Andy Fleming, Managing Director, Halogenics

Andy Fleming is co-founder and lead developer at Halogenics, a Melbourne-based software company delivering innovative and intuitive solutions for the biomedical research and education sectors. Andy manages all aspects of the business from research and software development through to sales and personalized customer service and support – one of the key elements of the Halogenics offering. The small team at Halogenics supports hundreds of customers at more than 15 sites around Australia – juggling is a required skill. A keen sportsman in his younger days, Andy now survives by watching sports of all kinds, traveling, and spending time with his family.

Dave Wehr, IT Manager, Magview

As a veteran in the technology field for the past 15 years, Dave has always had a knack for efficiency and productivity. He’s been working on the MagView team for almost four years and has a passion for delivering customers the best experience possible. Thanks to the tools that Atlassian has made available to their organization over the past couple of years, keeping their team’s efforts organized has been made dramatically easier! In his spare time he enjoys camping, hiking, traveling, and spending time with friends and family.

Your 5 questions, answered

1. What types of Support notifications are you pulling to chat?
Magview: Critical issue creation, Critical issues resolution, Inter-project issue resolution
Halogenics: As much as we can! For support, we get all the Jira and Jira SD ticket creation/update/comment/resolution changes, plus updates from NewRelic, Boundary and MMS for monitoring, and then Bamboo and TeamCity build updates for the developer team.

2. What is the monitoring tool, or tools, that work well with Hipchat?
Halogenics: We use NewRelic, Boundary and MongoMMS – they’ve all got built-in channels or plugins for Hipchat notifications and the documentation will walk you through the setup. We’ve also experimented with using things like Zapier to setup integrations. The Hipchat API makes it pretty straightforward to receive the alerts, you just need a tool that can work with it.

3. It sounds as if Hipchat has replaced the need for the standard Jira email notifications… is this indeed the case?
Magview: We do not use it as a replacement to standard notifications, however rely on Hipchat to deliver the most important real-time information that requires immediate attention; for everything else we continue to review the email notifications.
Halogenics: We still have email, and it still works, but we’re increasingly finding that using Hipchat to aggregate the various sources not only gives us a good central reference point, but can highlight were a support ticket may be related to a service incident. If you see a server outage warning in the room feed just prior to the tickets arriving, you have a good lead on where to start looking to resolve the tickets for the customer. And yes, you get that with email too, but there’s usually more noise – you’ll probably get other emails mixing with the alerts and notifications and that can make it harder to catch the important things.

4. How do you get reports in Jira?
Magview: By using JQL to identify areas of concern, several dashboards were created
Halogenics: Mainly dashboards and the Jira Service desk metrics. With a relatively small team, our volume is such that we’ve got a pretty good feel for how we’re doing, and the dashboards give us sufficient detail to back that up. We don’t do any custom reporting outside of that (for now).

5. What features does the Hipchat and Jira Service Desk integration have?

The integration lets you create dedicated Hipchat rooms straight from your Jira Service Desk ticket. It also lets you set up notifications in Hipchat with customizable filters. For more information, check out the Jira Service Desk and Hipchat integration page.

Try Jira Service Desk + Hipchat

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