JIRA Service Desk - Great OOTB, Better after customizing
December 13, 2017
JIRA Service Desk - Great OOTB, Better after customizing
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Service Desk
We use JIRA Service Desk for our primary help desk ticketing and tracking system. We support a user base of about 200 and have 5 enrolled agents. We had previously been using JIRA's issue tracking as a quasi-ticketing system, but needed a more robust system for tracking SLA metrics, utilization, trends, incidents, as well as provide a single pane for our users to view and update their tickets simply and easily.
- SLA tracking and reporting is really seamless and easy to generate. Our entire team can see where we need to improve and what's working well.
- Because the backend of Service Desk is JIRA, we can also tie in Kanban boards from our JIRA Software, so we can more easily visualize where tickets are in their lifecycle and quickly triage and escalate.
- I can easily build custom graphs and reports based on ticket types, categories, or other filterable fields which really help with presenting metrics upstream.
- Integration with asset management systems is severely lacking out of the box. It frankly fails at being a component of a true CMDB unless you want to pay for third party plugins or write an API call into another application.
- Smart tracking of emails is also lacking. If a user replies to a generated message it will open a new ticket with the title "Re: Original Ticket Name" which is a pain to manage. Other tools will use the ticket number in the subject line or some other "smarter" way of tracking.
- Automation can be difficult to build. They're relatively straight forward, but you need to have a good understanding of your business processes in order to ensure that the appropriate fields are set. There's also a relatively limited number of automation tasks you can build into the system.
- JIRA licensing can be confusing, especially considering the jump in cost from $10 for a small/test team to $1,700 for the next user tier. But from an ROI perspective, we've reduced the number of man hours chasing and tracking emails and through SLA reporting have increased productivity and response times, which has more than captured the ROI.
- Providing users with a ticketing portal that has automated Tier 0 support drove down our help desk calls and freed up our resources for other higher skilled tasks.
- We demoed the cloud version of Service Desk and found that overall, the cost would be higher, and the feature set would be lower. It didn't provide the same level of customization, while over the lifetime of the product would have cost us significantly more.
We evaluated Remedy's ServiceNow as well as a few homegrown solutions (in SharePoint and in JIRA Software), and found that Service Desk's integration into the rest of the Atlassian suite of products was the best selling point. We already were licensing a number of Atlassian products, and being able to add a Service Desk that pulls from those sources automatically and without much configuration was great. ServiceNow is a very robust tool that checked a lot of our boxes, but it came down to price and integration for us.