Jira incident management. Effective and secure best practices

Jira incident management can feel like a never-ending struggle.

It’s even more frustrating when a simple oversight turns into a critical outage.

Here’s how to take control of your incident management process and prevent small issues from snowballing into disasters.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a set of guidelines for managing IT services. It defines incident management as responding to problems that disrupt these services. The goal is to fix these problems quickly so that everything works normally again. Incidents can be big or small, depending on how much they affect the service. For example, a major incident might be a complete system failure. On the other hand, a minor incident might be a temporary error that only affects a few users.

The ITIL incident management process consists of multiple stages. First, a user, a system, or a team member finds and reports an interruption. Then, one describes an incident at a service desk along with all related links to tasks. In the next step, your agents review and properly categorize the incident. It helps the team during post-incident activities and reporting.

After the classification, prioritize your new incident. It’s best to do it based on its urgency or impact on the service. When you have a priority set up, the team can move on to diagnosing and finding possible solutions. During this stage, the support agents communicate with incident reporters.

Finally, the service team resolves the incident. After verifying whether the fix has been successful, you can close the incident. Note: It’s a good practice to document the resolution stages for future reference.

ITIL distinguishes between incident management and problem management. At first glance, an incident and a problem are similar as they both cause service malfunction. What are the differences between them?

ITIL defines a problem as a cause or potential cause of one or more incidents. Conversely, an incident is a single unplanned event that leads to a service disruption. You can track an incident back to a wider problem. 

Problems and incidents are connected. Both need to be properly managed by the team. The ITIL guidelines advise traditional IT teams to treat incidents and problems separately. According to them, problem management should focus on preventing incidents and minimizing their impact. Sometimes it takes time.

In contrast, incident management concentrates on fixing existing incidents quickly, possibly in real-time. This approach’s strong point is that both processes’ goals are clear. The transparent division helps to avoid situations in which the whole IT team tries to deal with minor incidents instead of looking for the root problem. The weaker side of ITIL’s approach is a possible knowledge gap between incident resolution and problem analysis. Any communication breakdown can lead to a misunderstanding of the cause.

Besides ITIL, there’s also a DevOps approach. DevOps teams often face the challenge of prioritizing incident management over problem management. Instead, they treat problems and incidents as two inseparable halves. The supporters of the DevOps methodology point out that incidents often have more than one root cause. They believe that only collaboration leads to improvement. There’s no point in excluding any part of the team if an incident or a problem impacts a service. This can lead to recurring issues that are never fully resolved.

In essence, incident management is about resolving issues as quickly as possible. In contrast, problem management aims to prevent issues from starting in the first place. Both are essential for maintaining the reliability of IT services.

In Jira ticketing system, incidents and problems are related but distinct concepts. Incidents are typically reactive. They focus on restoring normal service operations as quickly as possible.

Problems are the underlying cause of one or more incidents. Problems are proactive. They aim to prevent future incidents by addressing the causes of recurring issues.

What does it look like in Jira’s workflow?

For example:

Incident: A server crash caused a website outage.
Problem: Insufficient hardware capacity leading to server overload.

The main goal of the incident management system is clear. It needs to provide teams with in-depth details about disruptions within the service.

Good incident management tool helps identify the time, circumstances, and details of errors. The useful system should support collaboration inside and across the teams. What’s more, just as in the case of any other tool, the incident management one must be intuitive. It should be easy to learn and customizable. Even for non-tech-savvy people.

A system for managing incidents needs specific features. They include categorization, linking, and tracking of issues. The functional tool helps reduce incident resolution time. For this purpose, you need notifications, a ticketing system, or additional integrations. Last but not least, it needs to offer processes for getting to the root of the problem after the incident lifecycle ends. 

ITSM processes have developed over the last few years. The shift to digital technology made customers want more from IT companies. To answer these needs, companies look for resources that help provide the best quality service. At some point, Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk evolved into JSM. If you know how to set up Jira Service Management, the new tool comprehensively covers the growing ITSM needs. 

Jira Service Management meets all the requirements of an efficient incident management tool. An intuitive service desk allows users to notify about service issues. With apps like Queues for Jira&JSM, you can gather alerts from clients and employees in one location. This way you can easily categorize and then prioritize them. Jira Service Management also informs everyone involved about the current issue status. Thanks to this, you gain trust and can reduce the number of incoming tickets.

Last but not least, the teams can automatically create post-incident reports. It improves incident response practice in the future. In Jira Service Management, all related tasks are linked to each other. Thanks to this, the employees can track them to completion and find the root cause. 

Here are the steps to create an incident in Jira Service Management:

This structured approach ensures effective incident management in Jira.

If you need more details, please refer to the Atlassian documentation. 

Jira Service Management provides a dedicated workflow. It’s called Incident Management workflow for Jira Service Management. It’s a good idea to start with it and then adapt the workflow to your business’s individual needs. Below we will present some tips that should help your team manage incidents in JSM. 

First, set up Service Level Agreements. They make it possible to track if the team is meeting the customer’s expectations. Jira Service Management has built-in SLAs where project admins can create specific goals. You do it in the Project Settings, and then the SLA section. The goals should determine the types of requests we wish to track and the estimated time to resolve them. At this point, you define the conditions and calendars that change when Jira SLA measurements start, pause, or stop.

If you aim for better communication, display SLAs on request forms. You can do it with the Extension for Jira Service Management app. With SLAs and statuses on requests, stakeholders can see them any time they want without needing to consult agents. Thanks to this transparency, you gain more time and trust and make sure everyone’s on the same page.  

The next thing will help your team prioritize incidents. If a critical service error appears, it can be marked as major. Major issues are more visible than others and grouped under the JQL-powered Major incident queue. To mark an issue as a major, we need to turn on the major incident toggle in the Details section. 

When you manage multiple projects simultaneously, use apps like Queues for Jira&JSM. With the plugin, you get all issue queues in one place. If you can sort and filter them altogether, you won’t miss anything major. 

Jira Service Management allows Slack integration with your service project. You already know that when it comes to incidents, the sooner we step in, the better. With Slack connection, you create dedicated channels for all our incidents. To do it, click on the Create channel link. Then, add incident responders to these channels, update incident priorities, and take incident actions. All this is to help the team act faster in the case of incidents.

The external stakeholders are not direct responders to an incident. Nevertheless, they still need to be updated about the progress. Only this way they can take precautions and actions. With Jira Service Management, you can add people as stakeholders and update them with e-mail messages. You do it by selecting Manage next to the stakeholder’s field under issue details. To send an update, we select Update stakeholders from the Activity section of the issue view. 

Jira Service Management lets you easily check the source of incidents. Each issue view has a linked issues field with a list of connected objects. It makes finding the root cause of each incident and the other way around intuitive for the team members. If your project needs more extensive options, try our Extension for Jira Service Management. It provides its users with additional fields, attachments, and views.  The app helps make sure all important information is included. 

Post-incident reviews (PIR) support uncovering weak spots in your service. They also decrease the incident resolution time. Documenting incidents informs how similar issues should be handled in the future. With post-incident reviews, teams can create long-term solutions to problems.

To turn on the feature in Jira Service Management, go to Project Settings and Features. Then, click on Post-incident reviews under ITSM categories. To create a new report select Create in the top menu bar. Choose the post-incident review request type from the drop-down list. After filling out the required information, connect the incident to the PIR in the linked issues field.

Opsgenie provides its users with notification mechanisms. Teams can create automated alerts that include detailed information about the issue. The Atlassian tool makes it possible to set up on-call rotations. It also has scheduling features and alert escalations. When users execute actions in Opsgenie, issues in Jira Service Management automatically update. If users close the alert, the issue in Jira Service Management is resolved.

Do you want the details on how to set up Jira Service Management and Opsgenie? Go to the Atlassian Community.

Incident management is crucial for maintaining the reliability of ITSM. Ignoring it can lead to many issues. They include service disruptions, data loss, and reputation damage. Here’s what you can do to prevent these risks. 

A service can’t be fully functional when plenty of incidents happen. Especially if the same issues repeat or if they are severe. Let’s take, for example, security-related problems such as data leaks. If IT teams don’t fix security problems right away, it can be harder to find their source and stop them from happening again. This may result in financial penalties for the organization or even worse consequences.

Incidents also negatively influence customer satisfaction. That means a lot in a competitive IT market. Clients won’t stay if there are constant interruptions. They are more likely to choose other solutions rather than deal with issues and contact support too often. Even if your agents do their best. It’s because time spent on additional communication always increases the project’s budget. Not to mention the frustration resulting from the inability to perform because of the inoperative service.

The other significant aspect is economizing employees’ resources. Ineffective incident management leads to going back and forth to fix the same mistakes. Instead, the teams should take care of new or just more demanding problems. You can see the consequences not only in delays when it comes to project deadlines. Poor incident management also reflects in employees’ professional burnout.

The Extension for Jira Service Management app can help you deal with these potential risks. With its features called Dynamic Forms and Bundled Fields, it lets you simplify request forms. It’s a win for users, customers, and support agents. 

With Dynamic Forms in Extension, you only see the fields that matter. For example, if you report a server crash, you’ll be asked for server details. But if you report a network outage, you’ll be asked about network devices instead. This makes forms easier to use and helps you provide the right information.

Additionally, with the same app, you can group related information in bundles. It makes issues even more clear and understandable: 

It’s impossible to predict all issues that may occur during the software development process. However, we can prepare the teams with some universal pieces of advice. Atlassian came up with the values that guide the teams on how they can approach incidents to identify, resolve, and finally learn from them. We believe there’s something in them for all of us.

If the team can spot a service interruption before the clients, it will save lots of time for the support team agents. What’s more, protecting users from incidents will surely get a company some trust points. This is why it’s a good idea to monitor service functionalities regularly. The smart way of doing it is to set up alerts that can automatically inform the team once anything goes wrong.

When customers let the team know that the service is down, the best we can do is focus on minimizing the impact and fixing it as soon as possible. Incidents will always be a part of software services. There’s no point in wasting time blaming a client or an employee. Customers will appreciate our work if we know how to make the interruptions go away. We can build users’ trust by letting them know about both scheduled and unplanned downtime. Making your clients and employees informed about what’s going on will surely pay off. 

A quick ad hoc reparation of an incident often is not enough. After the incident happens, the team should identify its root cause and implement changes that will fix it. Taking care of the broader problem will also prevent similar, related incidents from occurring. A more global approach can turn out to be prevention and an overall improvement of service at once. Remember that establishing a strong, logical incident management process is crucial to quickly reducing the impact and restoring services.

Gain the trust of your clients back by not letting the same incidents happen again. Always look for the bigger picture as it will protect you from repeating errors. The best idea is to create an incident management playbook. Plan your incident response strategy. And we’re not only talking about technical issues. If there were communication problems during the improvements – draw your conclusions from this too. However trivial it sounds, use incidents to make your service better. 

Incident management is a critical part of ITSM. Ignoring incidents leads to decreased customer satisfaction and increased project costs.

To manage incidents following ITIL guidelines, you need to:

Follow these best practices and see the results yourself. They include improved time management, faster updates, and fixes. The list closes with the most important one: the customer trust.

Do you wish to improve the incident management process across your company? Think about investing in a dedicated ITSM tool. For example, Jira Service Management. The tool’s features and integrations will help you handle incidents easily.