• Article
  • Dec.12.2017

Insight: Asset Management for Jira Service Desk

  • Dec.12.2017
  • Reading time mins

If you’d like to integrate a CMDB into your Jira Service Desk client portal, we have great news for you –  with the Marketplace app Insight by Riada, you can manage assets directly in Jira! Your users will be able to communicate precisely which equipment is impacted by their incidents or the applications which have bugs.

We’ll take a look as to how to configure Insight and Jira Service Desk to provide a personalized experience for your clients. This article is intended to be a broad overview of how to make Insight work for you, however if you have more detailed questions you can check out the app’s documentation.

Install and configure Insight

Once the app is installed via the Atlassian marketplace, the Insight menu appears in the top menu of your Jira – the CMDB is therefore fully integrated with your instance.

You can decide whether to start from an Object Schema template or you can create your own from a blank page. In our example, we started with an empty Object Schema template and built the tree diagram below to represent our CMDB. We list everything from employees to laptops – and even the meeting rooms.

 

 

Import Jira users

To configure the object type Employee, we start by using the import function for Jira users. In order to link each Employee to a Jira user, we added an attribute Jira user of type User:

 

Once the configuration for the Jira user import is set and ready to go, we can synchronize the Jira username with the Jira user attribute for the object type Employee. This allows us to clearly define the link between each employee and their Jira account.

 

 

Define the link between users and assets

Now that the users have been created inside Insight, we can define an owner for each asset. For each asset, we need to create an Owner attribute which is directed to an object type Employee.

 

This configuration allows us to define which users has which smartphone, computer, mouse, etc. You can therefore create a repository that you can use when you manage incidents and thus refer to during your reporting.

For example, let’s take the employee profile below which is in Insight. The Inbound References show the objects that she possesses: keyboard, laptop, mouse and smartphone.

Visualization of assets

Insight integrates a visualization of objects, allowing you to easily see the links between the different objects in your CMDB. If we take the example below of Alice Martin, you can clearly see the objects she has:

 

 

In the same window, if you click on her smartphone, Insight will show you the objects linked to her smartphone.

 

 

In just a few clicks, you can easily understand the links between all the objects in your CMDB and estimate the potential impacts during incidents.

In addition, for each object in Insight, you have a sidebar showing all the Jira requests where it is referenced.

Integration in the Jira Service Desk client portal

Once your CMDB is up and running with Insight, you can also configure it so your Jira Service Desk clients can benefit. To do this, you’ll need to configure a custom field. For example, let’s say you want to integrate a field “impacted material” into your customer portal, you’ll therefore create a custom field type Insight Object.

 

 

In the configuration menu, define the following parameters for the custom field:

  • Object Schema to define the Insight schema where you would like it to be directed.
  • Object Type root to indicate which level you want on the list.
  • Attribute filter to potentially restrict the objects that are offered to your customers.

 

In this case, we’ve written this attribute filter in IQL, Insight Query Language:

 

This query reduces the list of objects displayed in the customer portal’s form, only showing those that are owned by the current reporter of the issue. When Alice connects to the customer portal and creates a ticket for the incident, only the assets that are linked to her are listed in the Impacted equipment field.

We quickly gave an overview of how to implement Insight with Jira Service Desk. Of course, you can also use Insight with Jira Core and Jira Software, and likewise use this app to manage other things besides a CMDB. That’s the strength of Insight – it is a flexible tool that is simple to configure!

As Valiantys was recently named Top-Selling Partner Worldwide for Delivering Top Sales Performance on Insight for 2017 by Riada, you can be sure that we know this tool inside and out. Get in touch with one of our certified consultants if you need any help on how to configure and use this nifty app!

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