Integrate ServiceDesk Plus with Jira for Better Support-Dev Collaboration

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Were you ever stuck in a limbo because your support tickets lost visibility when they were handed over to the dev team? The constant struggle to keep your support and dev teams in sync, while they work in completely different tools, is real.

This is exactly the kind of friction we’re solving by connecting ManageEngine’s ServiceDesk Plus with Jira. When these two systems talk to each other, your teams can stop chasing updates and start solving customer tickets faster.

Let me walk you through why this integration makes sense, and how you can set it up in a way that fits your workflows.

Why integrate ServiceDesk Plus with Jira?

The answer to this question is pretty simple. Your support teams work in ServiceDesk Plus, and your dev teams love Jira. When some of the customer tickets need to be passed to the dev team, people resort to copy-pasting (or worse, send a bunch of emails).

With a ServiceDesk Plus Jira integration in place, everything will sync automatically. The support teams will have full visibility of the ticket status, while the developers will have all the necessary details right within their own Jira.

Which brings us to the next point.

What does it look like in practice?

Here are a few everyday use cases where integrating ServiceDesk Plus with Jira makes life easier.

Incident escalation

A user reports a bug to your IT helpdesk (ServiceDesk Plus). The agent confirms it’s a software issue and needs the developer’s attention.

By setting up an integration, the ticket raised in ServiceDesk Plus will automatically find its way to Jira. All the necessary details can be added so the developer has everything at hand.

When the Jira issue status is updated, the ServiceDesk Plus agent immediately sees the update in their system.

From there, when developers comment, add data to custom fields, or resolve issues, all updates will flow right back in ServiceDesk Plus, so the agent can always keep customers in the loop.

Sync change requests

Say someone from your team needs a system upgrade or a new feature has been rolled out. The IT team jumps in and logs a change request in ServiceDesk Plus. But before its approval, it needs to go to the team working in Jira.

With integration, the change request is automatically synced to Jira as an issue, where it can be further tracked, discussed, and deployed. Once things are finalized, the results are synced back to ServiceDesk Plus for final documentation or closure.

Multi-instance ITSM integration (JSM to ServiceDesk Plus integration)

Maybe, as an MSP, you’re working with multiple customers using different Jira instances, geographically apart, one in Europe, another in North America. But, your central IT service team works out of ServiceDesk Plus or other ITSM tools like ServiceNow.

Instead of making all these instances work in silos, you can connect them to a central ServiceDesk Plus instance. That way, your global IT service management team can act and work on issues from across the world in a single place. Each local team continues to work in their own Jira environments, but information flows smoothly to (and from) ServiceDesk Plus or ServiceNow.

In my experience, this kind of setup works very well for large, distributed organizations, aka cross-company integrations. It can help you automate critical business processes, track metrics centrally, and still respect how individual teams prefer to work.

What do you need to integrate ServiceDesk Plus with Jira?

You need an integration tool, one that plays nice with both platforms and gives you enough flexibility to define what you want to sync and when.

Exalate is a tool that lets you:

• Keep full control of what you share and how it’s mapped.
• Set up real-time, uni or bidirectional sync so both platforms are up-to-date.
• Use scripting to customize your sync to match your workflows.
• Use AI Assist, if scripting is not your thing. Just enter what you wish to sync, and the scripts are generated automatically.

The best part? Every team can set up their sync rules independently, so no one has to compromise on how they work.

Want to give ServiceDesk Plus Jira integration a try?

Want to get started with your ServiceDesk Plus-Jira integration?  Book a call with our team or head over to the Exalate integrations page. Everything you need to kick things off is right there.

And if you’ve already tried this (or something similar), I’d love to hear how it’s working for your team. What use cases did you solve? What hiccups did you run into? We can swap notes in the comments.

[francis]

The video where Majid explains how things get configured