Concluding the Jira Ops early access program

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 10, 2019

Concluding the Jira Ops early access program

At Atlassian Summit in September 2018, we announced our vision of faster incident resolution for IT operations teams, with the acquisition of Opsgenie and the launch of the Jira Ops early access program(EAP). One of the key aspects of our vision for incident management was called out in that blog:

When activity is scattered across many different tools, it’s hard for teams to stay coordinated.

As we’ve spoken to many of you, and started integrating the Opsgenie product into Atlassian, we’ve realized how much better it would be for all our customers – past, present and future – if we could combine the strengths of Opsgenie and Jira Ops into a single product.

So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve taken many of the ideas pioneered in Jira Ops like a unified timeline, standardized postmortems, chat integration – and have begun to bring them into Opsgenie. We’ve also redesigned Opsgenie to look, feel, and work like other Atlassian products.

You can read more about the new and improved Opsgenie in our recent announcement.

What does this mean for Jira Ops evaluators?

First, we’d like to thank all of our early access evaluators who tried out Jira Ops, and especially those of you who have already made it a regular part of your workflow. We know any type of transition from one product to another can be difficult, and we’re here to help you however we can.

The Jira Ops early access program officially concludes today, and the product will be closed for access on June 17th. We are offering a complete migration of your incident tickets from Jira Ops into a new Jira Software project, so you can continue to access and use your incident data after the product is closed. The migration process can be run at a time chosen by the administrator. For most evaluators, it will take less than a minute.

We’ll also be offering an exclusive discount for Opsgenie Enterprise to all Jira Ops evaluators, so you will have no trouble getting started with Opsgenie’s incident management capabilities. To be eligible, you will need to contact Opsgenie Sales for verification and purchase Opsgenie Enterprise before September 1, 2019.

I’ve included some FAQs below, but please ask any further questions on this thread. Our support team is also available to assist with any specific questions or migration needs.

Thank you, and onwards!

During the Jira Ops early access program, we’ve received a lot of great feedback and I’d like to personally thank all our evaluators for participating and openly sharing your feedback. I truly appreciate everyone who has joined us on the journey so far, and hope you’ll continue with us on this exciting next chapter.

We’ll continue to engage with you through the Opsgenie community – be sure to follow there for any future updates on incident management.

FAQ for Jira Ops evaluators

What is happening? What are the key dates?

We’re concluding the Jira Ops early access program and deactivating the product for existing evaluators.

  • April 10th, 2019 (today) - Jira Ops will no longer be available for new signups or new projects. Migration to Jira Software Cloud is available for Jira Ops project admins, to migrate at a time of their choosing.

  • June 17th, 2019 - Atlassian will automatically migrate all remaining Ops projects to a corresponding Jira Software Cloud projects. Jira Ops will be deactivated for all evaluators on June 17th. You must have another active Jira Cloud product on your site to continue to access your migrated Jira Ops data after this date.

Why migrate incidents to Jira Software instead of Opsgenie?

Opsgenie is a different product with many different capabilities, so an automated migration would have lost or changed much of the incident data and how you access it. Jira Software provides almost 100% data compatibility with Jira Ops, and can keep your old incident data for posterity after Jira Ops is closed.

Opsgenie is where we recommend tracking your incidents in the future. As well as offering many of the incident management capabilities of Jira Ops, Opsgenie offers a bi-directional sync with Jira Software, to keep alerts or incidents in sync with Jira tickets. We’re continuing to improve this integration and open to your feedback on how to make it work better for your team.

What data is automatically migrated? What isn’t?

Your incident project will be converted into a Jira Software project with the same issue configuration and workflow. Incident issues will remain as “incident” issue type, and have timeline updates converted into comments. Any third party integration data (e.g. linked Slack channel) will be posted as a comment for your reference.

The biggest differences are that hidden timeline updates will no longer be hidden following migration, and integration links/data will be static comments instead of links or panels with live information. In some cases, Jira Ops was only storing an ID to the external system, rather than a link to the complete entity, so only this ID will be available in these cases.

If I don’t have a Jira Software license on my cloud site, what will happen to my Jira Ops data?

We recommend setting up a Jira Software trial on your cloud site prior to running the migration and will prompt you to do so. If you do not have another active Jira Cloud trial or license on your site by June 17th, your site will be deactivated and you will need to contact support to get access to your issues post-migration.

Note that Atlassian’s data retention policy will result in Jira Ops-only sites having data deleted permanently on July 1st 2019, 15 days after deactivation, if you do not have another active Jira Cloud trial or license on your site by this date. We will notify any affected customers via email before this occurs.

What is the best way to get started with Opsgenie?

An administrator can start an Opsgenie trial directly from the “Discover Apps” page in the site administration of your existing Atlassian Cloud product. For more information about Opsgenie, visit https://atlassian.com/software/opsgenie.

Will the same integrations still work in Opsgenie?

Opsgenie has a comprehensive integration with Slack and we’re actively improving the Statuspage integration. Opsgenie also has over 200+ integrations with many monitoring, collaboration, ticketing, and automation tools.

How does Opsgenie integrate with Jira Software?

Opsgenie offers a bi-directional sync with Jira Software, to keep alerts or incidents in sync with Jira Software tickets as needed. We’re continuing to improve this integration and open to your feedback on how to make it work better for your teams.

Other questions?

Please ask below, and we’ll do our best to answer them. You can also raise a support ticket if your question relates to something very specific, or you’d like to share a private message with our team.

Updated on April 17th - extended Jira Ops deactivation date from May 15th to June 17th.

14 comments

Timothy Tesluk April 10, 2019

This is shocking and upsetting news, particularly the short timeframe we're being given to migrate. My team took 3 months to migrate from Jira Service Desk to Jira Ops, and now we're being surprised with an announcement that we have 1 month to migrate BACK again, when we had been expecting to adopt this product. 

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Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 10, 2019

Tim, thanks for the frank comment. I want to personally thank you and the team at SoFi for adopting Jira Ops wholeheartedly, and for sharing your feedback with us along the way. I appreciate this will be a tough migration for you as one of our most active customers.

I’ll follow up with you directly to see what we can do to help your team with this move. If the May deadline is still a big issue for you, I’m happy to reconsider this timing to ease the burden on your team.

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Steve Wang April 11, 2019

Can our team also get an extended deadline? After looking at what the new OpsGenie UI has to offer, its pretty lack luster in comparison to JiraOps.

Like Arunan Rabindran likes this
Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

Steve - please shoot me an email, and we'll line up a chat about what assistance you and the team at Acorns need.

Steve Wang April 12, 2019

Sent you an email. Hopefully we can come to an agreement. It seems like we're not the only team that had a negative impact with this decision.

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 16, 2019

Thanks all for the feedback. After discussion with some of the affected teams, we've postponed the deactivation of Jira Ops until June 17th. The dates in the post above have been updated.

Steve Wang April 10, 2019

Being able to create slack channels and send statuspage comms from Jira was our bread and butter, can this capability be used in a regular Jira project?

Is there a way to automatically generate RCA docs like JiraOps had?

Agree with Timothy on this one though.

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Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 10, 2019

Hey Steve, Opsgenie will now be picking up the mantle of “major incident hub” for Atlassian, so we’ll be improving the Slack and Statuspage integration there to do what you need it to do. Some improvements to the Jira Slack integration are also in the pipe – I’ll make sure the team there takes these ideas on board.

Today we announced postmortems in Opsgenie to help you perform your root cause analysis and easily create tickets back in Jira to get the follow-up work done. So please give that a try and let us know what you think.

Will S April 10, 2019

NOOOO we love Jira Ops. Just got it hooked up to Slack and Statuspage and it's been very slick.

When can we expect a full product launch?

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Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 10, 2019

Thanks for the kind words, Will. Keep an eye on the Opsgenie community to follow our developments in DevOps land. We have a lot of cool stuff planned.

dominic April 10, 2019

Bundling your incident management product into your alerting product is pretty ugly for those of us who are already happy with a different alerting product (i.e. one not owned by Atlassian).

Opsgenie also has over 200+ integrations with many monitoring, collaboration, ticketing, and automation tools

Specifically, it doesn't have any PagerDuty integration (which makes sense, given it's a competitor), whereas Jira Ops had a pretty good one.

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Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 10, 2019

Thanks for raising this, Dominic. This is a trade-off that we thought deeply about, and discussed with many customers.

Our ultimate goal is to help teams resolve incidents faster, and we realised this could best be achieved with a single experience that allows you to seamlessly collate alerts into an incident, alert additional responders to bring them into an incident, and so on. This led us to the conclusion that alerting and incident management are very tightly interrelated and need to be in the same product. (We also didn’t want to charge people for two products, when one could do the job!)

This might mean changing alerting tools for some customers. But we believe the end result will be a better experience and faster resolution of incidents for all customers in the long run. I hope you can take another look at Opsgenie and let us know if it will work for your team.

It’s also worth mentioning that we have integrations with PagerDuty for Jira Software and Statuspage, both of which are developed in partnership with PagerDuty and may prove useful to your team.

John Hamilton April 10, 2019

Possibly a little off topic however would there be a plan to have a docker image of this new opsgenie platform?

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

Yeah, probably best to ask that one over in the Opsgenie community.

Thomas Noë April 10, 2019

What will happen with the JIRA slack integration? Currently, you could create a slack channel from within the issue. Will that still be possible? That was a great feature.

Trevor Thompson
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

Hi Thomas 👋 I'm the product manager for the Jira + Slack integration. While you can't do this with non Jira ops projects yet, we're looking at pulling this functionality into all Jira project types in the near term. 

You can track the progress of this feature here:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/API-65

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Thomas Noë April 11, 2019

This was the best feature in years for JIRA and now we cannot use it anymore. I don't understand why you disabled a nice project with nice features without an alternative. You keep your customers unhappy with this behaviour. 

Like Steve Kearns likes this
Steve Kearns April 11, 2019

I agree with Thomas. We just spent time evaluating JIRA Ops (which we were happy with) and will now have to spend more time evaluating alternative products.

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

@Thomas Noë, @Steve Kearns  - just to be clear, Opsgenie is now our recommended incident management solution and our suggested alternative for Jira Ops evaluators. If you see any reason that won't work for your team, please let us know here or send me an email with the details. Thanks!

Thomas Noë April 11, 2019

The reason why jira ops was/is so good is the fact of the nice integrations it had inside jira and not in another tool. The whole team is inside jira and not in another tool. So why do you want to move all incidents to another tool? It does not make sense. In jira ops we mix functional incidents with opsgenie incidents. So we can keep track of all incidents in 1 place. We can also involve dev engineers in it without moving to another tool. So I really really think this is a bad and strange decision jira took. And we dont even have an alternative. Why would you disable a nice running beta project if it does not hurts jira but it helps your customers to delight them. Is this how you treat your customers? The communication also can be improved. I must say that JIRA has a very bad name amongst many customers. I almost never heard a positive word about JIRA. Everybody is making fun of JIRA. And this is again confirming that feeling we all have about JIRA. @Matt Ryall 

Reiss Snooks April 12, 2019

@Matt Ryall i think an issue here is also the terminology being used by Atlassian is actually confusing and conflicting.

Really, OpsGenie should be "Major Incidents" and "Problem Management" rather than simply Incidents. Especially since you have Jira Service Desk as your platform for "standard" Incident and Service Request management for servicing BAU.

Reiss Snooks April 11, 2019

My concern here is the lack of postmortems into Confluence from OpsGenie. I don't see that listed anywhere in this article and is a huge part of the workflow we adopted using JIRA Ops.

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Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

Good question, Reiss. I'll follow up with the team to see what we can do about Confluence integration for postmortems on the Opsgenie side.

Reiss Snooks April 11, 2019

@Matt Ryall after doing further digging, this breaks so much more than just postmortems. The "new" postmortem functionality doesn't even let us see which incidents don't have a postmortem created against them.

There is also an issue with the JIRA Integration. At present this only allows you to create alerts, not incidents, using webhooks. We need the ability to create an incident directly to opsgenie from jira so that we can then generate an alert and ensure that the entire major incident flow is followed.

This is a massive step backward and was not was I was expecting after I had a feedback call a couple months back.

Instead of going through support, is there a way I can have a phone call with someone to go through the real meat of the issues and see what can be done ready for May 15th? I fear it's going to cripple our ability to react, resolve and complete effective postmortems come that date.

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Steve Wang April 11, 2019

You also can't keep track of the status of linked issues to the incident/postmorterm without manually clicking through each one. 

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

@Reiss - thanks for the detailed feedback.

I'm happy to line up a phone call with your team and see how we can resolve these issues. Please drop me a note at mryall@atlassian.com.

Ivy Zmuda April 11, 2019

Have to echo disappointment with Atlassian and this decision. Early access implies an eventual product release, and I'm sure we aren't alone in the opex dollars that were spent on integrating JiraOps workflows into our processes.

We'll have to re-evaluate whether the Jira stack still makes sense to us without the tight integrations that were available between OpsGenie as a paging tool and JiraOps as an incident management tool. A very odd decision given this will undoubtedly drive sales to Atlassian competitors. 

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Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 11, 2019

Thanks for your feedback, Mike.

Our goal in improving incident management functionality in Opsgenie rather than Jira Ops is to make the integration between paging and incident management even better than it could be with two separate products.

If it would help to see a demonstration of how Opsgenie can help you manage email, please send me an email and we can line that up.

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 16, 2019

Thanks for all the feedback in this discussion so far. After reviewing the situation with customers and our teams, we've decided to postpone deactivation of Jira Ops projects until 17 June 2019.

I hope this gives your teams the extra time they need to transition to incident management with Opsgenie. I'll update the post above to reflect the new dates.

Reiss Snooks April 17, 2019

Good news. I'm on a call with OpsGenie in a couple weeks to go through the Major Incident workflow so hopefully its something that they can get in place for then otherwise our postmortem process is going to suffer.

Julien Bailhache April 23, 2019

Thanks for postponing conclusion of JIRA Ops project to June 17th. This remains for our team a very small timeline to adjust our incident processes, and validate/integrate OpsGenie in there. Training oncall people around a never-seen-before tool only a few months after JIRA Ops was introduced is going to be very challenging. Is there any way you could allow a longer transition time? Q2'19 is a high activity quarter, and revisiting our processes would have been so nice to achieve in Q3'19!

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Steve Wang April 22, 2019

Did you guys just shutdown JiraOps early? My JiraOps project got automatically converted to a software project. 

Matt Ryall
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 28, 2019

Hi Steve - no, nothing has changed on our side. As mentioned in our email thread, I suspect one of your project admins must have inadvertently migrated your project.

Please raise a Jira Ops support ticket, and one of our engineers can look into it further. This is also recommended if anyone else on this thread has trouble with migrations.

Steve Wang June 17, 2019

It was a good run. Thank you to the JiraOps team who gave us a taste of a great product. Poor choices were made in deprecating this without OpsGenie taking in any features.

Like Rafael Fonseca likes this
Reiss Snooks June 17, 2019

Agreed. It's a shame OpsGenie doesn't have hardly any of the functionality Jira Ops did, and when it will, it won't be accessible from Jira. It'll be completely disconnected.

So much for a single pane of glass.

Rafael Fonseca June 18, 2019

It does feel like a step backwards to deprecate a product that was perfectly tailored to most shops (from a simple skim of the comments here) in favour of a product whose features are not quite yet at parity level with Jira Ops.

Instead, you could have deprecated new signups and left it running for existing users while you built up the functionality to match.

After evaluating OpsGenie, I came to the conclusion it simply does not get anywhere close to what Jira Ops gave us for a unified incident workflow.

Javier_Garay June 24, 2019

I didn't got time earlier to post something about this, but there are some basics from JiraOps that are not present in Opgenie. All our team had access to JiraOps to comment and track incidents, but with Opsgenie they will have to log and learn another tool to handle incidents. And what about the postmortem analysis or the incident tracking updates/messages? Opsgenie, at less for me, is just an escalation/notifications tool that can be integrated with external monitoring tools to declare incidents, but how will we to hendle them? Where are the features to keep a good track of the issue? Should we need to track them using a Jira Software project? Really?

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