In 2017, we were thrilled to learn that Jira Service Management was named the #1 Most Affordable ITSM solution and the #1 Most Popular ITSM software by Capterra, an independent review site that compiles reviews from millions of users.
In addition to service request, incident, problem and change management templates for requests that make it easy for any team to set up a new ITSM project, we have some add-ons that can help with everyday service management.
Service Request Management
Jira Service Management’s customer portal makes it easy for anyone to file a request. Here are some great add-ons that can improve the customer experience when they file requests:
- Customize your help desk portal: Want to brand your customer portal to reflect your company’s brand? Check out Refined Theme for Jira.
- Configure your request forms with nFeed: nFeed makes it easy to connect external data to your request forms.
- Create dynamic forms: Want to show specific computers (such as Macbook Pro, Macbook Air) after an user requests a computer? Extension for Jira Service Management makes it easy for IT teams to add dynamic fields based on a user’s selections to get all the information that they need.
- Make onboarding easier: If a new employee files out a request, sometimes that requires a few other tickets to be filled out. For example, if a new hire joins, that may require a ticket for the IT (new laptop), Finance (payroll) and Facilities teams (new badge). Create on Transition for Jira means that your team can set this workflow up automatically.
Knowledge management
If you have Confluence, you are in luck: Jira Service Management integrates with Confluence. Self-help articles will automatically show up when customers enter certain keywords, and can deflect tickets for your IT team. We also have invested in machine learning: Over time, your service desk will learn which keywords are relevant to which articles.
Other great add-ons that help you get the bang for your buck with Jira Service Management and Confluence:
- Personalize your knowledge base with branding and better organization: Create a dashboard within your IT space, and customize it with your team’s branding with Refined Theme for Confluence – and show it off to customers.
- Take advantage of IT specific templates: Create new pages for applications or servers with the IT System and Application add-on.
- Import CSV tables into Confluence: Want your team to plan and review IT projects in a data informed manner? Advanced Tables for Confluence enables teams to import CSV data into tables within your knowledge base.
Incident management
If you work in technology, perhaps you heard about the latest AWS outage in February. Even the most versatile software companies have bad days.
Your team needs to be prepared for the inevitable bugs and incidents. Jira Service Management’s powerful integration with Jira Software means that IT teams can quickly report, communicate, and solve outrages with IT operations teams and developers. Yet there are many ways to be on top of incidents by integrating with communication, monitoring and automation tools.
- Automatically create Jira tickets from events in Splunk or New Relic: Jira Service Management integrates with Splunk and New Relic so that an incident logged by them can easily create a Jira ticket that is enriched with all the right information so that your IT team can resolve incidents faster.
- Reduce tickets during incidents with Statuspage: During the AWS outrage, millions of checked Statuspage for updates. Statuspage helps with incident ticket reduction from customers because they can refer to Statuspage for the latest communication, rather than filing another ticket letting the IT team know about the incident. Jira ServiceManagement x integration with Statuspage helps even more with that ticket reduction by showing a notification on the customer portal letting customers know where to look for information about the incident.
- Automate and route tickets to the right people with xMatters: We recently highlighted our integration here, but in a nutshell Jira Service Management integrates with xMatters, a toolchain communication platform, to help automate and standardize your incident management processes so that your IT teams never miss a beat. With this integration you can quickly identify and notify the on-call resource based on escalation rules, on-call schedules, skills, and location or automatically assign the Jira Service Management issue to the responding user.
- Quickly get context on an application with PuzzleLogic Service Advisor: If your team wants to understand quickly where an incident is occurring within the structure of a service model and what the impact is, PuzzleLogic Service Advisor can help. PuzzleLogic Service Advisor’s integration with Jira Service Management allows an IT team to quickly doubleclick right from a Jira Service Management ticket on a broken application’s recent logs and events, other related Jira tickets, and what servers it is connected to.
- Automatically create a post mortem page in Confluence after an incident: With Workato integrations, the possibilities are endless. Create post mortem pages in your knowledge base after an incident ticket is closed, or create an inventory of related incidents in your knowledge base.
Change Management
Many high performing IT teams deploy at least twice a day.
In order to mitigate risks and manage expectations, it’s crucial for the IT team to be on the same page with processes and tools.
- Visualize all major changes in a calendar: Connect your Jira Service Management/JIRA Software tickets to Confluence Team Calendars and visualize quickly what important changes are happening in the next few weeks. This integration means that your Jira fields will automatically update the calendar.
- Automatically create subtasks for a major change: With the add-on we’ve mentioned earlier, you can automatically create sub-tasks within Jira Service Management. For example, if your team is doing a major production application system upgrade, with this add-on it will create a task for: the database backup, database upgrade, the application web-server upgrade, and a systems test. This way there is less risk of your team forgetting a component for a major change.
Asset management
Insight – Asset Management for Jira is an enterprise ready solution that allows you to control and manage all types of assets as well as connecting Jira issues to them.
On top of that, what would you do if we told you that you could do a network scan and auto-magically get detailed information about all network attached assets (such as printers, servers, computers, routers and switches) being used? Insight Discovery’s integration with Insight can do this.
The Insight platform can not only do that, but it can also:
- Import assets from various sources (database, CSV, LDAP, etc.)
- Perform dependency mapping & impact analysis: Visualizations can help you and your team plan for important changes and properly assess risk.
- Automate processes: Get notified or create Jira Service Management tickets if a server becomes unresponsive or a license is up for renewal.
- Discover multiple networks: You can deploy a Discovery server for each network.
There are also other add-ons that touches the asset management area such as this one for inventory management.
Improved communications
Communication is the lifeblood of any organization’s collaboration culture.
- “Swarm” or collaborate on tickets as a team: Create a Hipchat room right out of a ticket by using Jira Service Management’s integration with Hipchat and work with your team to quickly solve problems.
- Get notified of important changes: Integrations with Hipchat and Slack enable IT teams to stay on top of important information. Examples include: a high priority ticket gets submitted, a CEO files an urgent ticket, or something breaks. When you are on the go, you can get notifications on your mobile devices.
- Get customers to share screencasts of problems that they are experiencing: Cloudapp allows your customer to share their experiences inside the product to reproduce bugs faster with rich video or marked up screenshots.
Want to check out these add-ons for yourself? Check out the new marketplace!