Atlassian’s JIRA is arguably one of the most popular ticket & process management tools being used in the software & application development industry today by teams that follow the agile development methodology. We at Cygnis Media use it exclusively and are big fans of the product. This is why, we are extremely excited by the latest news that Atlassian is acquiring OpsGenie to bring DevOps under its umbrella as well.
A little bit about OpsGenie; it is a fantastic tool in its own right which consists of several features such as incident management, automated alerts, escalation rules, monitoring & reporting to mention just a few. DevOps related work is different from your typical software engineering tasks in the sense that DevOps tends to be far more time sensitive, and in some cases, time critical. It is imperative that the right person or group of people are informed immediately when a certain trigger happens, and they are given all the relevant information needed to resolve the matter.
Currently, for DevOps, we had created a JIRA project called “DevOps” and would raise a ticket there, assign it to the DevOps person, tag them in it, have our Slack integration with JIRA then generate a message in Slack, which we would then tag them in, leading to them getting a push notification alert on their phone. With OpsGenie, all of this would become automated, and with their deep integration with Slack & JIRA, we would have all the information condensed and synchronized.
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In the event that a server stops responding, OpsGenie would automatically raise a ticket and begin to the contact the person on-call either via voice, sms, email or push notification. If that person is unreachable, it would escalate the ticket and begin to attempt reaching out to backup personnel. The person responding to the ticket would see all the relevant information related to the outage, along with any documents or attachments that are relevant, such as commands needed to resolve, or a reference document regarding previously encountered issues with similar symptoms. This is immensely helpful for when a person unfamiliar with a project is on-call. Once they take action and resolve the ticket, all the details will be logged for the manager to be able to review at a later stage, and even generate monthly, quarterly or yearly reports to gain insight on the frequency of issues, response times, resolution tactics, and more.
With DevOps becoming more and more intertwined with software engineering as of late, with the rise of scalable back-end infrastructure such as Docker and Kubernetes, it has become more & more important to be proactive with your DevOps tasks and management. OpsGenie is a welcome addition to this field, and we are extremely excited to have it under the Atlassian umbrella to go along with our JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence tools.
