What are JSM Services?

[Irina Mosina _TechTime_]

Hi there, 

As Solution Partners, we deal with all sorts of complex scenarios for Jira Service Management implementation and recently we started coming across more and more customers who are concerned about a lack of guidance around Jira Service Management's definition of Services. 

What are Services? 

How do you define them? 

How do they link to Teams and Responders? 

How do they relate to Assets? 

How do you choose to map the out-of-box Object Schema called "Services" which is normally used in the default field Affected Services to the list of everything that we need to track? 

Is it to depict the relationship between our other custom objects? 

Is it to list all of our organisation's applications or capabilities and use it to automate the Responders team assignment? 

Clearly we, as JSM experts 👔,  know answers to those questions, but if they pop up repeatedly, we can do a better job educating our customers about this topic. 

So I thought I'd reach out to the collective brain and see if this is a common set of questions that especially new to JSM teams are pondering on and if there are more of them. 

I would love to hear your different use cases and the challenges you've had. 

In the meantime, I will start working on a little best-practices article that I hope will help with some practical shortcuts and hands-on advice. 

[Davide Cioranu]

Hi Irina,
I'm glad to have found this on the community, I cannot find any detailed instruction available to end users which go in depth into the options available.
The only article available does not provide a clear description and usage of each field What are services? | Jira Service Management Cloud | Atlassian Support.

All the questions you listed are currently what I'm trying to get my head around. 
Taking as example any generic IT team, what would each Service type be used for?
I presume business services would be something used not directly used by the IT department, but more to define services the business offers, in that way these could be tied to the Software services or applications (e.g. Business offers Transportation services which could be linked to Software services which support those services). 

For the application type, I presume this is specific to client applications? Or would SaaS also fall under this?

[Irina Mosina _TechTime_]

Hi @Davide Cioranu , your question somehow slipped through the crack of the Community alerts, and with the new experience, I just got all the notifications! 

Please see my answer below, hopefully it gives somewhat of a guidance on where to start your mapping. 

Irina  

[Stefan Michael Kreidl]

Hi @Irina Mosina _TechTime_ , 

I hope you are still following this topic.

We are currently setting up our Service / Service Offering / Application Structure in the Jira assets.

However, I have no idea how to use those services for the "affected services" field in Jira.

Could you please elaborate on the best practise to document the service structure ?

Or whats the idea of the Service feature in JSM ? Just a duplication of the Services in the assets ?

Thanks for your help

Stefan

[Irina Mosina _TechTime_]

Hi Stefan, 

The thing is, Affected Services field in JSM is actually coming from Assets - it's an Object field just like other you can create manually, but it's locked for customisation. 

The crucial link

Services (aka Affected Services) are the glue that ties together Incidents raised and Changes approved. By specifying a Service you are requesting to deploy your change, you are enabling the Service Desk Team to quickly zoom in on the Incidents that might happen around the same on the same Service. 

Responders/Alerts

The next thing that the Services field enables is the ability to trigger an alert to the appropriate team (Service Owner) and specific responder who is on the roster at this time for Incidents and Major Incidents. When you create an On-call schedule within your Jira project for an Atlassian Team you can create a roster, routing rules etc to make sure the escalation lands with the right people. Alerts are linked to the Service you've specified.

Services Hierarchy

Despite Services being locked in the Assets for modification, you can still Edit them in the project itself defining change approvers, service owners and the TYPE. At this moment there are 4 different types of services that CAN form some sort of hierarchy. I see success with set of services defined following the structure like this (top to bottom): 

Capability (Finance)

 - Business Service (Billing)

 ---Application (Xero Invoicing)

 ------Software Service (Jira API integration)

The latter can be linked to the actual repository and monitored as Components in Compass. 

If you would like for me to have a look at your use case, feel to connect on Linkedin and we can unpack it at your own pace. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/irinamosina/)

[Rodney Estrada]

Number one challenge has to be trying to configure an automated bidirectional integration between JSM Assets (Cloud) and Jamf and Intune. The Assets documentation is lacking, especially for which Intune permissions are needed, and I can't find anyone else trying to do the same thing in Assets.

[Irina Mosina _TechTime_]

Hi @Rodney Estrada yes this still remains a challenges, but I hear this is being worked on. Below Im quoting our support team addressing the question to our customer: 

Both scheduled exports from InTune and automated imports into Assets are the gaps. Both gaps are ultimately addressed in JSDCLOUD-14881.

Long answer:

• At the moment the export/transform data step is just a process you trigger on some agent. I.E. it's schedulable through crontab or Windows scheduled processes.
• On the import side, you need to retrieve the file and upload it through the Assets import functionality (manually most likely). 

• • There's an Assets Import API available that the connector apps use, but using it involves a complex setup process compared to just plugging in a relatively cheap app. We've never used this method before, but it's conceptually a similar amount of effort to just creating your own forge app. Docs for each:

• • • https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/assets/imports-rest-api-guide/workflow/ 
    • https://developer.atlassian.com/platform/forge/assets-import-app/