Jira Service Management Review | PCMag

Atlassian's Jira Service Management has seen significant updates since our round of help desk testing when it was called Jira Service Desk. Many of the new features and capabilities come by way of company acquisitions over the past couple of years, including Halp (an internal ticketing system), Opsgenie (an incident management tool), and ThinkTilt, which makes ProForma, a technology Jira now uses for smart forms creation. The new capabilities are impressive enough to raise Jira's rating in this roundup, but continuing difficulties around third-party integration keep it behind our big-business Editors' Choice winners in this space, HaloITSM and Vivantio.

An Expanded Scope

Jira changed its product name because the platform's broad coverage areas have grown significantly. For example, ProForma forms can be used as-is or extensively customized for particular cases. New visual features such as a dependency graph allow agents to see the impact of one specific incident on other IT systems to provide a big-picture outlook.

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What stands out here is that Jira now allows customers to choose the primary focus they want the platform to address, from areas such as internal IT support to IT operations, facilities management, marketing content, and software development. Each area of focus is considered a project and can come from a predefined list or a customer-defined entity.

Jira Service Management Pricing and Plans

Jira Service Management offers a free tier for up to three agents, giving you a chance to try the product at no cost. The first paid tier, called Standard, costs $20 per agent per month. Next is the Premium tier at $45 per agent per month.  All paid tiers support up to 5,000 agents and an unlimited number of customers. You can also expect pricing discounts once the number of agents exceeds 15, contact Jira for more information. For large enterprise installations, the company offers customized pricing and dedicated support.

Some additional features, such as integration with social media, carry add-on costs. You'll also need an Atlassian Access subscription to utilize single sign-on (SSO) and Active Directory credential syncing. This service costs $4 per user for up to 250 users.

Overall, this sounds expensive, but it's actually competitive when you compare Jira to the other enterprise-class, ITIL-compliant help desks we reviewed. Editors' Choice honorees Vivantio and HaloITSM are both ITIL players, and these range from $40 to $70 per user per month, depending on how many users you're signing up. Jira Service Management may lag slightly behind those two in terms of third-party integrations. Still, you may decide its new and more advanced features make up for that, as long as you're careful during your evaluation process.

Interface and Unique Features

Like some of its competitors, Jira Service Management has upgraded users' ways to seek help to include business messaging apps Slack and Microsoft Teams. Atlassian calls this “conversational ticketing,” with a two-way link between Slack and Jira opening a whole new way of delivering support. The Slack integration is in production now, with Microsoft Teams in beta as of this writing.

The acquisition of ThinkTilt means the ProForma low-code/no-code forms creator has been integrated into the Jira platform. This makes it easy to build forms for various purposes and add intelligence to each field. This is something you can usually do only with a coder at your side, but while we found it a bit more complicated than point-and-click, a little training should be all that's needed for complete non-coders to create very functional forms. To help out, there's a new Your Coach feature, which provides quick access to help and documentation to get new agents up to speed quickly.

The updated self-service portal seeks to provide a place where employees and customers can answer common questions with no need for human intervention. Artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology in the background will bring new learning capabilities. Atlassian hopes that thanks to AI, the customer portal will deliver better answers as time goes along. However, this is not easy to test in a limited-time evaluation period, so make sure you include it among your product demo questions. While we found that HappyFox had a more targeted implementation of conversational ticketing, Jira Service Management also intends its AI to reduce the time to resolution for both users and service agents.

Jira Ticket Management

Getting new tickets into the system and managing them once they're there are two workflows at the heart of any help desk system, and Jira Service Management has improved on both counts. A Filters item is now available on the top of the page, which lets you quickly apply recently used filters, view all available filters, or summon a more advanced issue search tool. You get a few basic filters like All Open Issues and All Resolved Issues out of the box.

The technically astute can quickly create queries using the Jira Query Language (JQL) interface, as you might with a standard database query language. For example, you could use the following to display issues updated in the last week:

updated >= -1w order by DESC

New filters can also be saved for reuse. This same filtering capability shows up in other areas, such as the reporting tool. The Your Work tab provides quick access to Work Assigned to Me, Recent Incidents, Boards, and Queues. Queues are another new feature and allow agents to group incidents by any filterable field.

Third-party support for social media now permits customers to submit tickets from Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of chat services using one of two add-ons, Conversations for ITSM or OmniChat for Jira Service Management. These are not included in the base product and do come with an additional cost.

Reporting and Data Export

We found that Jira's reporting tools have seen several improvements since our last review, which is to be expected considering Atlassian's Opsgenie and ProForma acquisitions. Reports are structured to use filters, which present a list of service requests. These are customizable because they're based on a specific set of user-defined criteria, which is how you build custom reports.

If you need more meaty analysis, Jira lets you export data to a CSV file. That's pretty standard for a platform as advanced as Jira's. we definitely would have liked to see direct integration with a more powerful analytics tool like Tableau or Microsoft Power BI, which is something the competition offers, even the entirely free Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk.

Several dashboards come ready to use for Operations, Platform, and Service Desk. A default dashboard offers information pertinent to the current user. You can modify existing dashboards or create a new one from scratch. Widgets on the dashboard can be rearranged or deleted if not needed. Filtering also works with dashboards to only display data of interest. Jira provides a variety of widgets to meet most informational needs.

Solid With a Few Hiccups

Overall, we found that the improvements to Jira Service Management since our last review add value to what was already a solid offering. Some annoyances remain, such as the need to pay for Active Directory and social media integration and some pretty basic data export capabilities, which keep the platform from Editors' Choice consideration. But the inclusion of accessible, smart forms, team messaging integration, and AI-savvy problem resolution boosts Jira's grade from our last outing.