How to use modern incident management

Jira Service Management’s integration with Opsgenie provides a modern incident management solution so you can seamlessly manage incidents for your service projects. With this integration you can:

Escalate an incident in Jira Service Management to a major incident in Opsgenie. Opsgenie then sends alerts and notifies the correct teams to quickly swarm and resolve the incident.
Create a major incident in Opsgenie from an existing incident in Jira Service Management.
Link an incident in Jira Service Management to an existing incident in Opsgenie.
Use all additional functionality included as part of Opsgenie: on-call schedules, monitoring tool integrations, multi-channel notifications, and more.

Major incidents are created in Jira Service Management and managed in Opsgenie. When a major incident is created in Jira Service Management, Opsgenie creates a corresponding incident and a responder alert. The responder alert finds the correct team and person and instantly notifies them about the ongoing incident. The response team can then quickly start working towards resolving the incident.

Watch how incident management works in Jira Service Management.

If you’re already using a service project that was created in Jira Service Management (formerly Jira Service Desk), you can enable Opsgenie features by adding Alerts and On-call to your sidebar navigation. Otherwise, use these features by creating a new ITSM project.

If you have separate licenses for Opsgenie and Jira Service Management, consider merging Opsgenie with Jira Service Management.

Getting started with Opsgenie

To get a notification from Opsgenie, you must first add your contact details and set notification rules. After setting up a response team and on-call schedule, you’ll be ready to create a major incident.

Add your contact details

Notification preferences are highly personal and vary according to each user. To avoid missing important notifications we recommend all Opsgenie users complete their profile and notification settings as soon as possible.

From your service project, select Alerts to go to Opsgenie.
Select Settings > Notifications.
Enter your email address.
Enter your phone number under SMS and Voice.
Download the Opsgenie app from the App Store or Google Play.
Log in to your Opsgenie account to activate mobile push notifications.

Set notification rules

After you’ve added your contact details, customize how you receive alerts based on each alert action so that Opsgenie knows the correct way to notify you depending on the situation. This will prevent you from getting too many notifications, and ensure that you don’t miss critical alerts.

From your service project, select Alerts to go to Opsgenie.
Select Settings > Notifications.
Scroll down to set your Notification rules.
Select Add rule.
Enter a name for your rule.
Select which type of action you’re creating this rule for.
Select +Add new condition to create the settings for rule conditions.
Select +Add notification method to set your preferred notification methods for each rule set.

Learn more about Opsgenie notifications.

Set up a response team

With your contact details and notification rules in place, you can create a response team and on-call schedule in Opsgenie. This will make sure when a major incident is created, Opsgenie immediately creates a responder alert to notify the right person in the on-call schedule.

From your service project, select Alerts to go to Opsgenie.
Select Teams.
Select Add team.
Enter a name for your team.
Add members by searching among account users
Select Add team to save.

Your default on-call schedule, escalation policy, and routing rule will be automatically created.

Learn more about Opsgenie’s team dashboard.

Set an owner team to your services

The last step of setting up Opsgenie is to assign an owner team to the service. This will let Opsgenie know which on-call schedule to notify when an incident occurs on that service.

From your service project, select Alerts to go to Opsgenie.
Select Services.
From the service list, go to the service you want to set an owner team.
Select Assign owner team.

Create a major incident

As of October 16, 2024, some capabilities of this feature are only available for Premium and Enterprise plans. Read more about the plan changes.

Now that you’ve completed your Opsgenie setup, you can create major incidents in Jira Service Management.

From your service project select Incidents.
Go to the relevant incident and select Create major incident.
Select an Impacted service – this will alert the response team.
Include a short description of the problem in the Incident message field. Enter an Incident message and Incident description.
Select Priority.
Select Create major incident to save.