Integrate with email

What does the integration offer?

Jira Service Management provides product-specific integration plugins for many widespread monitoring tools and any software system that can send HTTPS/JSON requests for integration. You can add email-based integrations from your team’s operations page.

Set up the integration

To configure your email integration, complete the following steps:

1. Go to your team’s operations page.

2. On the left navigation panel, select Integrations and then Add integration.

3. Search for “Email” and select it.

4. On the next screen, enter a name for the integration.

5. Optional: Select a team in Assignee team if you want a specific team to receive alerts from the integration.

6. Select Continue.
   The integration is saved at this point.

7. Expand the Steps to configure the integration section. This is where you find the customizable email address the email integration is assigned.

8. Select Turn on integration.
   The rules you create for the integration will work only if you turn on the integration.

Jira Service Management creates an alert for each email sent to the specified email address. By default, email integration uses email subject as the alert message, and email body is put into the alert description field. If the incoming email comes in HTML format, Jira Service Management also attaches the original email to the alert.

• If an email integration is turned off, Jira Service Management ignores emails sent to the email address.

• If you turn off the notifications, Jira Service Management creates alerts, but you won’t receive any notifications for them.

Configure alert rules

With the default setup, Jira Service Management creates alerts with minimal configuration. By further configuring the integration, you can:

• define rules to notify different set of members on your team about different emails

• define rules to acknowledge or close alerts by using resolution/recovery emails instead of creating separate alerts for them

• modify alert content by allowing Jira Service Management to parse the email by using string processing methods

Following are the different types of alert rules you can create and apply to emails:

• Ignore

• Create alert

• Close alert

• Acknowledge alert

• Add note

• Heartbeat

Each alert rule type has an associated filter determining the action for processing incoming emails. Each email is processed by only one action, and actions are evaluated in the top-down order. The first rule that matches your alert runs the action associated with it. For example, if an email matches the filter for a create alert action, it is never used for a close or acknowledge action. Multiple actions can be created for each type of action.

Alert filters

• All the alerts: No conditions in use

• Only alerts that match any condition: Any one of the defined conditions is true (OR operator).

• Only alerts that match all the conditions: All the defined conditions are true (AND operator).

Define filtering rules based on the following:

• From name

• From address

• Subject

• Conversation subject: The email’s subject field, ignoring prefixes related to Replying and Forwarding emails.

• Message fields of the email

Alert actions

Ignore action

Some emails may contain no useful information. Ignore action allows discarding the emails that match the defined filter. For example, you can configure the action to discard all emails that contain the string "test" in the email subject.

Create alert action

Create alert action creates an alert in Jira Service Management if the email passes the defined filter. As stated in the basic configuration, the default configuration uses email subject as the alert message and body as the description. Create alert action allows customizing how the email is processed. String utilities can extract information from the email and populate alert fields.

Create alert action configuration has several fields that you can modify. Jira Service Management makes the email information (from name, subject, etc.) available as tags, and UI supports dragging these tags into alert fields. The values for these tags are specified directly or extracted from the email variables.

• The Message field contains the alert text.

• The Alias field is a special alert field that plays a critical role in alert processing, and can be thought as a user-defined unique identifier for open alerts in Jira Service Management. There can be only 1 open alert with the same alias in Jira Service Management. This allows Jira Service Management to 1) deduplicate the same/similar alerts 2) identify alerts, and therefore it is setting the alias field properly is essential to be able to update existing alerts (acknowledge, add note, close and so on).

• The Teams field indicates which team should be notified of alerts. When a team is defined in this field, Jira Service Management uses its escalation to determine the users to be notified.

• Entity is the name of the entity to which the alert is related, name of the server, application, etc.

• Source indicates where the alert originated from, typically the name of the monitoring tool or the From address of the email.

• Tags are labels used for easier identification and categorization of alerts. Use commas in between for multiple tags.

• Actions: The list of actions a recipient can execute to respond to an alert. Use commas in between multiple actions.

• Description: Detailed description of the alert; anything that may not have fit in the Message field can be entered here.

• Extra Properties: Additional alert properties. Enter the property's name in the first field and the value in the second.

• Note: Additional text message added to the alert when an alert is created.

• User: Owner of the notes which are added to the alert.

Close alert action

Jira Service Management reduces the number of alerts by using recovery emails to close existing alerts rather than creating separate alerts for them. As with other actions, close alert action also has a filter. Close alert action has three fields. The alias is the only mandatory field essential to identify which alert should be closed. If the User and Note fields are provided, then a note is added to the alert before it's closed.

Acknowledge alert action

In Jira Service Management, acknowledged alerts indicate that someone has seen the alert and taken responsibility for the alert. When a monitoring tool supports acknowledgment of the alerts and can send an email when an alert is acknowledged, these emails can be used to acknowledge the alert in Jira Service Management as well. Acknowledge alert action configuration is identical to the close alert action configuration.