Properly handling paging and incident alerts - JSM vs Pagerduty

[Zach Taylor]

Hello everyone, 

This is my first post here!

I am migrating our user base from our current ticketing system (HappyFox) to JSM. One problem I need to solve before I can move forward is properly alerting our support staff when an incident occurs.

Currently, we have 2 kinds of alerts based on the priority of a submitted ticket:

• A P1 incident will page someone 24/7
• A P2 incident will page only during business hours

Those work schedules are managed within Happyfox, where the smart rule is run.

When looking into creating work schedules in JSM it appears that I am required to create and manage teams, around which on-call rules, alert routing, etc can be built. However, I don't see any way to automate team membership via an Atlassian group or sync users against a directory. Each team has to be manually created and managed which is a lot of user management overhead and duplicates effort already we've already spent in OKTA/Pagerduty. All of our services, teams, and schedules are already created and in use in Pagerduty and I'd like to leverage that as much as possible. 

My questions are:

1. Is there any way to create automation in JSM that will "wait" to email Pagerduty until working hours? Maybe some kind of regular expression to compare the created time against?
2. If that's not possible, how can I automate my Teams against my Atlassian directory of users?
3. Lastly, is there a better method than what I've come up with? I am not an expert at JSM or Pagerduty.

Thank you for your help!

[Connor · Accepted solution]

Hi @Zach Taylor 

1. Yes, using notification policies you can delay alert notifications until a defined time. E.g., delay until the following morning at 9am.
2. User management of Atlassian Teams is lackluster, manually adding/removing users seems to be the only way. It might be possible to automate using the API but that's not something I've spent any time investigating. Here's a related feature request: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-80976 
3. Can't really answer this without knowing your setup or the capabilities of Pagerduty which I'm not familiar with. At the very least, I'd recommend comparing the alerting/notification capabilities of JSM against Pagerduty, and the pricing. You would be able to then determine whether it would be functionality possible, and economically worthwhile, to replace Pagerduty with JSM. If JSM could be used instead of Pagerduty that would be one less system to manage.

[Zach Taylor]

Thanks for your reply!

1. I found a way to make it work from the Pagerduty side. Can't invest in the JSM environment without better Team management

2. Manually managing teams and their schedules is not an option for us. I have played with the API a bit, but don't have the resources to try and automate that myself.

3. Seems to be the best method for us at the moment.