What are priority levels in Jira Service Management?

Every work item in Jira Service Management has a priority level. The priority level conveys the severity of a work item so that agents can react accordingly, it identifies the relative importance of an incident and is usually based on the impact and urgency of a work item. It helps your agents prioritize work, and identifies the required time for actions to be taken to resolve them.

By default, work item priorities scale from:

Lowest - Trivial problem with little or no impact on progress. Color: Light grey.
Low - Minor problem or easily worked around. Color: Dark grey.
Medium - Has the potential to affect progress. Color: Yellow.
High - Serious problem that could block progress. Color: Orange.
Highest - The problem will block progress. Color: Dark red.

The name, descriptions, color and icon of a priority can be customized in your Jira settings by a Jira admin. You can also add new priority levels. Read more about configuring priorities and their descriptions.

Selecting a priority level

An agent can set the priority level when creating a work item using the priority field. Customer-submitted requests will automatically assigned a medium priority level. The priority of a work item can be changed at any time. To work on the priority of a work item, you can use the urgency and impact fields to help determine the relevant priority level.

Impact measures the effect of an incident on a business' processes. Impact is generally based on how your quality of service is affected.

Urgency is a measure of the time for an incident to significantly impact your business. For example, a high impact incident may have low urgency if the impact will not affect the business until the end of the financial year.

You can manually assign priority levels, or create an an impact urgency priority matrix and use automation to automatically assign priorities for you. Read how to create an impact urgency priority matrix or how to create an automation rule to prioritize your incidents.

Incident management

In incident management, Alerts can have the same, or a different level of priority as an incident so that you can control what alerts are sent for each of your incident priorities. For example, for a high priority incident, you might only want to send low (P4) level alerts. Learn more about alert priorities.