JIRA Service Desk
  • Article
  • Aug.11.2014

Using JIRA Service Desk for SLA only : the tutorial

  • Aug.11.2014
  • Reading time mins

The name of the product speaks for itself : JIRA Service Desk is designed for Service Desk applications of JIRA. And it comes bundled with a lot of features : queues, SLAs, reports, permissions etc. But if you are working in one of these companies which only need to track SLAs – whatever the use case you are working on – that’s a lot of clutter to deal with.

The good news is you can tune JIRA Service Desk to suit your need. Yes, you can have just the plain, old, back in the days VertygoSLA features that are now integrated in JSD. Let me show you how.

JIRA Service Desk simply for SLA

From a customer perspective, this looks like a tricky scenario. In fact, it’s pretty simple : you only need to know that you can disable any unnecessary features from JSD. Indeed, all the features that JSD has to offer are built as ‘modules’.

If you are a developer, you could build the modules you need yourself and test them using Atlassian SDK, as these are additional functionalities that you would want from JIRA, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. 😉

The current version of the add-on (1.2.6.1) has 164 modules that are enabled by default when you initially installed the add-on. These modules can be disabled i.e. removed from users view so they feel they are using standard JIRA version. The solution I will show you consist in disabling each feature one by one, so you are only left with SLA.

This requires JIRA Administrator permission.

Disabling unnecessary modules

Go to: Administration > Manage add-ons > JIRA Service Desk > click on ‘164 of 164 modules enabled

1. Disable ‘Create Issue’ drop down functionality to ‘Create Service Desk Request

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Module to disable here is called ‘create issue-replacement’ . You will then get :

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2. Disable ‘Service Desk’ section. This is the one next to either ‘Agile’ or ‘Issues’ menu on the top, depending on the version of JIRA you are using.

Module to disable here is called ‘service desk-section’. The Service Desk section disapears.

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3. Now let’s tune the project section.

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Disable ‘People’ section from Service Desk Project

This is to manage permissions on who can manage SLA’s, reports etc, but if you use standard JIRA permission scheme then you can assign it to this project, which eliminates the usage of this function within JSD

Module to disable here is called ‘agent-people

4. Disable ‘Customer Portal’. This is the view that the customers will have when raising a Service Desk ticket, if you are not using this feature, then you don’t need this either. This section is for creating request types that customers can raise.

Module to disable here is called ‘agent-customer-admin

5. Next is to disable reporting. Reporting is quite limited, as it will always give you a graph. You can choose to use reports offered by JSD or, you can use JIRA dashboards, in which case you can disable this too.

Module to disable here is called ‘agent-report

6. Disable queues. If you are using standard JIRA project, then you don’t need queues either as you can use dashboards to view your queues.

Module to disable here is called ‘agent-queues’ . Here is the final result :

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Only downside here is, since JSD home page is queues be default, you will be taken there straight away. It is just disabled from the view, but it is still active. So you will still see the queues section, however you can delete all the default ones.

Just a SLA section, finally!

Now you are left with just the SLA section. You don’t have any view of Service Desk, so how do you go to the SLA section? Simply by going to Projects > select your project > Administration > Service Desk > SLA

I find this tricks quite cool, because the result is seamless for end users. It feels like they are using standard JIRA functionalities, but actually they are using JSD as well. It’s just hidden from users view.

Now you’ve got a way to take full advantage of the SLA feature while keeping your usual JIRA interface.

If you haven’t tried JIRA Service Desk yet, maybe it’s time to discover it :

Try JIRA Service Desk for free

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