Atlassian, the company that has revitalized the internal enterprise call center business with its Jira system, on Sept. 5 launched a new version of the already successful cloud software that aims to help software and IT teams take better control of their incident processes.
The company describes Jira Ops as a hub for modern incident management, because many response teams need a central control to find the right tools and practices to solve new-gen issues. Without something like this, many teams simply “wing it” to patch together disparate tooling and processes that could lead to other problems later on.
For tech teams running 24/7 services, incident response is a critical challenge and a requirement for delivering satisfactory customer experiences. When services stop working, teams need to react immediately and fix things, or else risk losing hard-earned customers and revenue.
One-Stop Shop for Incident-Response Control
Jira Ops provides a single place to respond to incidents, connect point solutions and execute a consistent process for every incident. This helps teams resolve issues faster and decrease the chance of recurring problems.
Jira Ops, built on the market-leading Jira platform, offers:
- faster resolution by automating and streamlining key response activities;
- better visibility into ongoing incidents, helping colleagues and stakeholders get up to speed; and
- integrations uniting alerting, chat, and status page updates into a central place.
Some other pertinent data points:
- Customers of Atlassian Statuspage posted nearly 175,000 incidents in 2017;
- 82 percent of IT pros said downtime has a “significant impact on revenue,” according to a survey from xMatters; and
- 76 percent of those surveyed report frequently missing target resolution times.
More details on what Jira Ops does, according to Atlassian:
Speeds up response with automation and integrations: Jira Ops includes an incident management tool to fit Atlassian’s own incident process and the way the company sees incidents being run at many of the best tech companies today.
Pages the right people with alerting tools: Alerting tools page the right responders at a moment’s notice. To streamline on-call alerting, Jira Ops includes built-in integrations with OpsGenie, PagerDuty and xMatters. First-responders can raise a Jira Ops incident directly from an alert, or team members can create a Jira Ops ticket manually if they suspect an incident is under way. From there, they can alert more responders directly from Jira Ops.
Spins up a war room in Slack: Chat tools are where most of the action happens during incident response. Teams need to quickly open this line of communication to start discussing what’s happening and make a plan of attack. When a new incident is opened in Jira Ops, an associated channel is opened in Slack. The link to the channel is pinned on the ticket so anyone can easily find where the conversation is happening.
Sends Statuspage updates right from the ticket: Statuspage keeps end users informed during downtime and holds off the flood of support tickets. Jira Ops users can send Statuspage updates directly from the incident ticket.
How Atlassian Does Its Own Incident Management
Effective incident management requires more than just the right tools; it takes a process. Atlassian said it has spent more than a decade honing its own incident management process as it has scaled to a global company running dozens of products built on thousands of services for millions of customers.
In the spirit of open IT, the company has published its own internal documentation on how it does incident management. These are the real documents and processes its uses during incidents. This is also the content it uses to train team members to manage major incidents.
Jira Ops is free and available for early access beta users right now through an early access program. Atlassian said its aim is to launch a paid v1.0 edition in early 2019.
Atlassian Acquires OpsGenie to Add to Its IP
In other news from Atlassian, the company announced Sept. 5 that it has acquired OpsGenie for $295 million.
OpsGenie is a modern incident management platform for operating always-on services, empowering Dev and Ops teams to plan for service disruptions and stay in control during incidents.
OpsGenie has completed more than 200 deep integrations, and its highly flexible rules engine centralizes alerts, notifies the right people reliably and enables them to collaborate and take rapid action. Throughout the entire incident lifecycle, OpsGenie tracks all activity and provides actionable insights to improve productivity and drive continuous operational efficiencies.