Good bye Jira Service Desk, say hello to Jira Service Management

Good bye Jira Service Desk, say hello to Jira Service Management

Software development and collaboration tool provider Atlassian has given its Jira Service Desk a complete overhaul featuring incident and change management capabilities. The reincarnation is called Jira Service Management (JSM) and is available now.

In a blog post announcing the new tool, Edwin Wong, Atlassian’s head of product and IT, wrote that most tools in ITSM aren’t fit for modern workflows as they don’t truly facilitate cooperation and are far too rigid to push “business agility”. JSM therefore is aimed at providing development and IT operations with “a unified platform to collaborate at high velocity”, so that they are able to react to new challenges quicker.

To help with that and keep the software competitive, the “next generation of Jira Service Desk” was fitted with alerting, on-call scheduling and a few more features from incident response platform Opsgenie, which Atlassian bought in 2018. Additionally, the JSM team redesigned the agent experience to improve categorisation and bulk actions. Change management features, such as automated change risk assessment and advanced approval workflows, as well as integrations with various other software are meant to round out the first iteration of the product. 

Service Desk customers will automatically be moved to JSM. Costs are to largely “remain the same”, Atlassian promised, though a few (unspecified) Standard and Premium plan customers are subject to “a slight price increase”, and will be contacted with details. 

Organisations with Data Center or Server versions of Jira Service Desk that are interested in the Opsgenie features will have to purchase an additional license for the latter, which seems like another nudge toward making users switch to cloud products. Just last month Atlassian announced the end of support for all Server products on February 2, 2024 to focus on its cloud business.

Currently, the price plans listed at the JSM product website are $20 per user, per month for 1-15 agents on the standard tier while premium users will have to hand over double that amount. Smaller teams can get started for free if they stay below 3 agents.

Users of Opsgenie that are reluctant to shift over to the new service – now that its capabilities have been integrated – were reassured by Atlassian that “Opsgenie will continue to be sold as a standalone product for on-call, alerting, and major incident response”.  

Upcoming features planned for JSM include asset and configuration management as well as conversational ticketing capabilities of recent acquisitions Mindville Insight and Halp.