Software has become part of our daily lives – from sending money using your phone to signing contracts with a click. But all this progress comes with a downside – specifically, downtime. When a popular online service goes down, it disrupts millions of people and costs businesses $700 million per year in North America alone. Responding to service disruptions has become one of the biggest challenges facing IT organizations today. 

That’s why I am excited to share two significant announcements to help IT operations teams resolve outages faster and incur fewer incidents over time.

First, we’ve entered into an agreement to acquire OpsGenie, a leader in incident alerting. Over 3,000 customers, including Air Canada, The Washington Post, and Overstock, trust OpsGenie to manage their on-call schedule and notify the right people as soon as an incident occurs. Second, we’re launching a new product – called Jira Ops – to serve as an incident command center, giving your response teams a central place to coordinate their work during a major incident.

OpsGenie: alerting and escalation during a crisis

Prompt and reliable alerting is the critical first step in incident response. And because today’s applications are more complex than ever, incidents often require complex coordination between operations and software development teams.

OpsGenie helps notify all the right people through a sophisticated combination of scheduling, escalation paths, and notifications that takes things like time zones and holidays into account. And OpsGenie does all this with rock-solid reliability.

Jira Ops: one place to coordinate your response

Even after the response team acknowledges the alert and springs into action, they often have to rely on a patchwork of point solutions to get their jobs done, including:

• Alerting and escalation tools such as OpsGenie for notifying additional responders
• Real-time chat in Slack for diagnosing the issue and discussing a fix
• Incident communication via Atlassian Statuspage for keeping customers informed
• Customer service in Jira Service Desk for responding to the flood of emails and calls that come in
• Confluence and Jira Software for writing up a postmortem and tracking post-incident tasks

Each of these tools serves a valuable purpose. But when activity is scattered across many different tools, it hard for teams to stay coordinated. That’s why we built Jira Ops – a unified incident command center to give your team a single place for response coordination. Powered by Jira’s workflow engine, Jira Ops guides your team through the response workflow and automates common steps like creating a new Slack room for each incident.

And because great tools are even better when paired with the right practices, we’re including our own internal incident response handbook so customers can learn from the incident response techniques we’ve built up over the last ten years as a provider of cloud-based services.

A powerful incident management platform for today’s IT teams

Jira Ops and OpsGenie bring reliability and consistency to incident management and give your team a reusable framework that helps them resolve outages faster. But it doesn’t end there. Atlassian Statuspage, the market leader in incident communications, now offers deep integrations with Jira Ops.

Together, they form a powerful platform to help you respond to and resolve incidents faster. With Atlassian, your teams can be more effective across the entire incident lifecycle – from first response to communicating with customers to learning from root cause analysis – so you can deliver the best possible service to your customers.

We’re excited to serve OpsGenie’s customers and work with the entire OpsGenie team to offer the best incident response solution on the market.

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