At its Atlassian Summit 2019 conference, Atlassian announced updates to all the DevOps tools that make up Atlassian Data Center as well as upgrades to its Opsgenie incident management software to provide deeper integration with the rest of the company’s portfolio.
At the same time, Atlassian revealed it has rebranded the AgileCraft business planning application it acquired earlier this year to Jira Agile.
New capabilities added to Atlassian Data Center include the ability to set up smart mirror farms for Bitbucket Data Center; content delivery network (CDN) support for Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket and Jira Service Desk Data Center; rate limiting for Bitbucket, Jira Software and Jira Service Desk Data Center; issue archiving for Jira Software and Jira Service Desk Data Center; templates for deploying on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services public cloud; and a mobile application for Jira Server and Data Center.
Atlassian Data Center now incorporates Jira Software 8.0, Confluence 7.0, Bitbucket 6.0, Jira Service Desk 4.0 and Portfolio 3.0. The latest version of Jira Software 8.0 now executes advanced searches using Jira Query Language (JQL) 31% faster on average, while agile boards load two times faster and re-indexing times are now 71% faster. The latest version of Confluence adds support for multimedia files and additional analytics tools to the content management platform.
The Atlassian Cloud service has also been expanded to increase the user limit to 5,000, with an early access program signaling an intention to bring that up to 10,000 users soon.
Meanwhile, specific capabilities being added to OpsGenie include support for incident timelines to track response activities and key events; postmortems to help discover root causes and track remediation activities, a user interface that aligns with the rest of the Atlassian portfolio that fosters bi-directional workflow, the ability to automatically trigger events, integration with Slack collaboration software, the ability to encrypt data and Statuspage services integration to make it possible to share alerts with third-party services. Atlassian has also rebranded its Automation Actions to Opsgenie Actions; the company acquired Opsgenie last fall.
Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, co-founder and head of product for Opsgenie, said now that Opsgenie is part of the larger Atlassian product family there’s clearly more focus on helping organizations integrate best DevOps practices with more structured processes based on the ITIL format. The latest version of the ITIL format provides makes those processes more flexible, but there’s still plenty of room for Atlassian to improve the tenor of the conversation across what has become a bi-modal IT operations environment. As the level of synchronization across those processes increases, the amount of fatigue IT operations teams experience lessens as the number of alerts that need to be correlated across multiple platforms decreases, Mollamustafaoglu noted. In fact, rather than convening in a physical “war room” to resolve a issue, most incidents will increasingly be resolved via online chats, he said.
It may take a while before a period of détente emerges between advocates of DevOps and ITIL processes inevitably emerges. In the meantime, the more IT services management (ITSM) platforms become integrated with one another, the easier it becomes to achieve that goal. In fact, the major obstacle that needs to be overcome are much more likely to cultural rather than the level of integration that can be achieved using any specific ITSM platform.
