JIRA Service Management Reviews

From the same company of my favorite and trusted apps like Trello and Jira... We then gave Jira Service Desk a try. The user interface has a modern look and feel and is intuitive enough even for a novice user or admin. It has a pretty standard set of tools to run your usual IT Helpdesk and Support roles straight out of the box (Incident management, Problem, Change, SLA management, etc.). In fact, you can set up your helpdesk well within an hour (of course not counting the per company nitty-gritty). Default setup works, but it's also super customizable based on your company needs. The Dashboard has all the at-a-glance metrics, statistics and graphs to keep you up to speed with the overall status.

Again, coming from Atlassian, it has a ton of possibilities in terms of integration with other apps. I feel the constant stream of dev improvements and updates.

Even though I mentioned that the third party apps can be easily integrable, we find the documentation for creating one's own integration apps a bit lacking. Also, the creation of tickets can be more streamlined or simplified (perhaps with the minimum number of fields and button clicks) to make it easier or faster to create and then further details can follow.

I find the UI of Jira Service Desk very clean and modern compared to other service desks software on the market. Included with the service desk is a customisable user-facing portal for users to raise tickets in, which proved very popular with staff when raising tickets alongside traditional email tickets. Due to the way Jira splits service desks into different projects, we were able to create service desks for other departments in the organisation which helped improve productivity and workflow. There are some very useful and well-designed default reports included for ticket statistics (which can be used to keep management happy!). We found the default setup of Jira Service Desk fit our needs very well, but it is very easy to customise ticket workflows and other features to suit more complex needs.

For a service desk technician using Jira Service Desk the back-end UI for managing tickets can be a little overwhelming, however this can be fixed by editing the default workflows for tickets to hide not required information and details. The administration settings are somewhat unintuitively set out for system administrators, but once you get to grips with the layout it becomes easy enough to find what you need from the settings page. We found the instructions on the Atlassian website for setting up an external redirect with a custom URL in IIS a little sparse on detail, but a quick trip to the Atlassian forums cleared up any queries we had with the process.

The interface is quite successful and convenient

The app has no features I don't like....

Jira Service Management provides a ton of tools to build out you customer portal and internal ticket platforms. It has filled all of the holes in our previous solution right out of the box.

It is built for large, multi-team organizations so much of the power is not needed for a smaller company who requires a custom build but without all the hierarchy.

Its flexibility. It's a simple statement, I agree, and you're probably reading this wondering why I'm being so vague. But JIRA software is a bit hard to summarize simply because it's just so flexible. There's no "correct" way to use it.

It's rest API is pretty powerful too and very easy to extend Jira to "integrate" with 3rd party applications that doesn't have an official Jira integration.

Creating workflows can easily become very confusing and you can easily break how your projects in Jira work if you aren't careful. With every Jira production license you also get a free dev license so that you can set up an isolated dev/staging environment. This is invaluable and highly recommended. The downside is that there is no easy way to migrate any of your changes from dev to production. But there are 3rd party plugins for that.

Jira is extremely customizable, scalable, and easy to implement when compared with other SD platforms. Out of the box, it can be used as a tool to track incoming requests, however, paired with the thousands of compatible plugins, it is unparalleled. Jira SD has allowed our HR team to take our daily operations to the next level, transitioning antiquated, clunky paper processes into a 100% paperless experience.

My only complaint is when custom fields are added, you have to update every field configuration you have, individually. This is extremely time-consuming when adding multiple custom fields in an effort to create "forms" within Jira.

Integration with other Atlassian products. Allowed us to start tracking IT issues and requests without having to bring on yet another tool.

Would like to be able to more effectively roll out custom support portals for our users, but no native support for custom URLs makes this more difficult. It's too easy for customers to browse around and find portals for other customers.

Highly customizable dashboard is a huge turn on. You can see almost everything that is going on may be whether it is a project or an issue

When an issue go unaddressed for a long period of time, I suggest that there should be any way to automatically escalate or generate a reminder.

It is a very useful tool for project management and documentation, since it can be linked with different applications, as well as allowing you to implement various work modalities

At the beginning it has a high learning curve, until you can have a basis on how to use it

It is easy to see what has happened on a ticket and bringing my colleagues in to comment or assist is really easy.

There are some little quirks with emailing from a ticket that can be a bit annoying, i.e. if you just click reply you can add images but if you click to "reply to customer" you can't. But that's a minor annoyance and one that I can work around.

Jira Service Desk was very easy to get started with. You could literally sign up for it and begin using it within an hour. Ticketing system is very customizable and powerful. Customers can be added in bulk and customers can sign up for entering issues. We were able to create different projects (or service queues) so that customers could send requests for IT help, or administrative help, or help with projects. Each such project/queue had different fields. Metrics are all built into the software, so we can know how often Service Level Agreements were breached, who breached them etc. The sheer amount of customizability is a joy. However, without discipline and thoughtfulness, it is very easy to customize it the wrong way.

We feel that the price point could be lower and the speed could be a little faster. Atlassian has made improvements with speed. If a company had 5 people manning different queues and the issue volume is low, the cost would be ~1500/year for those 5 users. So, it would may not be cost effective for a small company that is watching their costs closely. We also felt that a Wiki is not built in. So, if a common solution needs to documented that spans multiple tickets, there's no way to do so. We could buy Confluence from Atlassian for an additional cost.

- Lots of tools in one place
- Integrates well with other apps (especially other Atlassian products)
- UI is clean and user friendly (customizable to a sensible extent)
- Contains useful metrics that are easy to configure and gain reports from
- Has multiple layers of user settings available for custom configuration to correlate to preferred levels of access among agents, customers, etc.

- Email bounce in frequently fails (bugs?)
- Depth of Jira admin user knowledge required for strong mastery of this app; time consuming to acquire a reliable user knowledge (which is necessary to utilize the app with the least bit of efficiency)
- Help docs, support mechanism unreliable/outdated (needs to be fresh and current to be applicable to present version of app)
- Confusing settings requirements for some user modifications needs (esp. where mapping/editing workflow schemes are concerned)
- Completely inadequate amount of general helps/tutorials available outside of Atlassian (YouTube, Google search, etc. for example) which seems a bit suppressed by design. Atlassian offers extensive training, but at a premium cost.
- Costly for the overall effectiveness it provides, after factoring these negatives along with the user time required to really learn the application.

Newbies to JIRA Service Desk can get a service desk project up and running in less than 30 minutes. If your organization is already using JIRA for issue tracking, then having a help desk with Service Desk is a no brainer. It allows you to integrate software teams and IT teams better within the same ecosystem.

The benefit of JIRA Service Desk, when compared with other help desk tools, is the customizability of your workflow. You can set up a workflow to be simple (with Open > In Progress > Closed statuses) or complex (with other statuses like On Hold or Waiting for Customer).

SLAs are highly configurable, with the power of JIRA's JQL functionality. So one can conjure up a query to fit their SLA needs. With the addition of custom fields, a Service Desk administrator can create fields to capture important information to streamline the help desk process.

Having Confluence also provides more benefits in which you can integrate an existing knowledge base space to a help desk project and self-serve your customers.

Finally, being in the Atlassian ecosystem enables you to add additional functionality and enhancements with the use of Apps. There are close to 1500 apps available for JIRA, and many are constantly updated by the app developers.

Administering JIRA Service Desk (and JIRA in general) can be daunting for a new user. With a number of customizations that one can do in a JIRA application, there will come a time where there can be a performance impact on the environment if the application is not governed well.

The Customer Portal (customer facing interface) is spartan in terms of customization. You can only customize so much, but it is limited in terms of branding it to suit your company's design specs.

- High Control
- Wide choices of features
- Confluence Integration
- Very rich suite of addons on premise version...

- ...which requires extra costs
- Some features are too basic and pretty much requires addons
- Learning Curve for admin requires effort

It's a good platform to track issues that are being handled by each individual in a project. It also has the option for notification being sent out when an item has been resolved, closed, or has gone overdue.
If it's configured correctly to have a backup, the team members involved can always learn from the past incidences reported. This will ensure that the team leader will be able to identify recurring items, timelines it took for resolution, and the team member assigned to resolve such items. This ensures that such items are priority issues that need in-depth understanding for them to be resolved permanently.

As an organization, we have not been able to integrate Jira with osTicket, which our customer Experience team uses. This means we have two Systems, and at times this can be overwhelming to track issues on both Jira and osTicket.

Jira Service desk works great. We use it in a media company in all of the service departments to track requests from Media ingest, to graphic requests, to crew requests. Our producers can easily log in from anywhere and fill out customized forms for the type of service they are looking for. The department gets the request in seconds and can start fulfilling it right away. In a fast pace news world, this allows us to get what is needed for broadcast air done fast while keeping track of all the work we have to do.

There are some features that you would think would come right out of the box with jira service desk that doesn't. The only way to get them is to buy a plug-in from their market place. Some features that we would like to see is having the requester see who is assigned the order & allow them to request updates to their requests.

JSD is relatively intuitive and easy to learn without needing tons of documentation. Initial pricing is attractive. A decent plugin community fills some gaps, but be expected to pay on top of the initial JSD pricing.

Many "obvious" features are either missing or do not work as expected.

For example: in many cases, once an internal user is added to an issue, they no longer receive notification about internal comments. This is completely unintuitive, unexpected, and has caused many people frustration: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDSERVER-3410

Another example: Email traffic about an issue is *always* public. Do not allow your staff to reply to JSD's emails as customers will also get emailed a copy! https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-3499

The worst part is, despite there being a few years' of discussion, and new comments added monthly by newly-affected JSD customers, Atlassian has no comments on the issues.

In some cases a plugin (more $) can help, but in some cases even the plugin manufacturers can't help as JSD doesn't expose enough info in their plugin API.

When you use this application as an addition to JIRA, it is a great tandem. I adviced my company to use Service Desk when we were discussing how to receive bugs and ad-hoc requests. We are using this application fro several years and we do not think about changing it.

The only bad point that I can mention about Service Desk is its price. A lot of clients I worked with complained about it. They manage really carefully the number of users that are Agents (users you actually pay for), and get really upset if they were not carefull enough and their bill was higher then they expected.

What I did like the most about JSD is the fact that you have a customer portal, a way to track and view your tickets at any time.
You can customize the product to at very last detail without too much trouble.

The stability of the software can be a sensitive balance after you reach 500.000 issues created on your instance.

Scalability.
Flexibility to be tailored to particular organizational needs.
Very rich in terms of features.

Setup can be made a bit simpler.
Could use more ready 'templates' that can be used to quickly roll out the product for production.

Jira has very useful tools for managing projects, in my opinion you exploit its advantages when they are big teams, its main advantage is the follow-up to the development and progress of the projects, the errors that arise during the development process and the management operational, it helps you see more, to improve development times and correct errors for your next project, also has free trials so you can enjoy its benefits.

The truth is that it is a very complete program, but I think your biggest benefit is when you are big projects, if you are a small team I think other tools will be better suited, besides the price is a bit high.

JIRA offers a huge amount of features, from simple support tickets to project workflow planning.
Our method of project management (agile) works brilliantly with this, we're able to assign work in 'Sprints' that match our real working week.
The ability to link JIRA with other 3rd party applications is excellent, we've integrated it with our content management system and QA / testing software.
The wide use of JIRA makes communicating with other organisations much easier, most support companies are at least registered here.

The pricing is rather expensive, its not too much of a problem for a large institution such as ours, but for smaller businesses this may be too much.
The user-interface and general layouts really aren't intuitive, for a new user it takes a while to get their head around the various features and processes. It took a few weeks for even the more experienced developers to get used to it.

I think my favorite feature is the internal comments. It's simple, but really helps to have a side conversation with your peers about an issue before commenting to the customer.

I'm also an Atlassian plugin developer, and the JIRA Service Desk Java API is pretty awful to work with compared to the APIs for JIRA Core and JIRA Software. That makes extending JIRA Service Desk way harder.

I also don't quite like the stripped-down UI offered to customers through the customer portal. As a regular JIRA user, I resent missing features, like being unable to edit my own comments or being unable to see a preview of any rich text that I might add (such as *bolded* or _italicized_ words).

I have also heard from my peers that SLA calculations are really tricky to get right, and often behave in ways you wouldn't expect.

JIRA Service Desk is a great way to enable everyone at our company to request things from Marketing with tailored forms for each type of request .... for example, business cards, collateral for events, changes to our website, updating sales enablement content, go-to-market support, schwag requests, etc. No more emailing stuff. Employees just fill out a form and can keep up with the status of their request. Our Marketing team just goes through each queue a few times a week and delivers a transparent and trackable service. We know the status of everything....especially the requests that are behind....waaay behind. Which is great.

It takes some expertise to set it up to suite a team's particular need. Most teams will need some JIRA/JIRA Service Desk expertise from someone to set it up. Once that happen, using it is easy.

Jira Service Management is an excellent choice to implement a full-featured powerful and easy to use platform for directing all your help desk activities. With many options to implement for user control, notifications, alert management, tracking KPIs, and structuring tickets into categories it provides an IT response desk everything they need to succeed.

The more users you have that have to actively participate in the life cycle of tickets the more expensive it can get