What is the difference between issue type and request type?

[Fahad Akhtar]

My Issue types are as follows: Document, Problem, Email

My Request Types are the same 3 as above. What is the difference between issue types and request types? What does a customer fill out in the customer portal, issue type or request type? Thanks

[Avinash Bhagawati {Appfire} · Accepted solution]

Hi @Fahad Akhtar ,

Please find below extracted content from atlassian documentation.

Issues:

Issues are how pieces of work are internally represented in Jira Service Desk to admin and agents.

Your Jira Service Desk administrator chooses what kind of issue types exist in your Service Desk project to represent different types of work that agents do. 
Jira Service Desk agents can self-assign Jira Service Desk issues. 

Requests:

Requests are how issues are phrased or represented on the customer portal to customers or end users.
Phrasing request types in a customer-friendly way allows your customers to quickly identify what kind of service or request they need.

The relationship between issues and requests:

• Request types are based on issue types that exist within your Service Desk project. You choose which fields and workflow statuses of an issue are surfaced to the customer in a request form on the customer portal.
  See configuring request types and workflows for more on the process.
  
  
• When customers submit requests through your customer portal or by sending an email to your service desk, their requests automatically become issues that can be tracked in your Service Desk project.
  All subsequent comments through the customer portal or over email will be added to the created issue.

Thanks,

Avinash

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

A customer fills out a request type.  A Request type is configured to map to an issue type.  THere can be many request types to a single issue type.

The idea is to give flexibility in the portal configuration to have many different types of request types without having to configure around many issue types.

A bit more reading can be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-desk-cloud/docs/categorize-customer-requests-into-request-types/

Hope that helps

Susan