The Evolution of Insight in Jira Service Management Cloud

Earlier this year, Atlassian integrated Insight Asset Management with their cloud-based Jira Service Management (JSM) solution. This has been great news for many who may have used Insight as part of their on-premise JSM infrastructure. Atlassian has bolstered this offering by updating Insight, implementing the ability to push discovered assets to the cloud without any manual intervention.

The Insight discovery tool is intended to be deployed on your network, where it will have access to any device with a network card. It will then discover your assets through SNMP, SSH, WinRM, or even a simple ping. Insight Discovery will categorize the asset, obtain useful information about the asset, and then push this information to Atlassian Cloud. You will be able to utilize this information with JSM by having an automatically-managed inventory of your networked assets. JSM allows for service requests to be linked to specific assets, so that the issues related to certain assets can be tracked and maintained in a historical record.

Having a record of an asset’s issue history can provide business insights into how well a specific model of hardware is working for your needs. It can also help track device stock and deployment status. These kinds of "insights" can be pivotal when making purchasing decisions and determining resource availability.

Before Atlassian integrated the on-premise Discovery tool with the cloud version of Insight, Isos had developed a custom solution to fill this gap. Utilizing the Insight REST API, we were able to ingest Discovery scans and publish this data within client’s Insight workspaces. With this custom integration, clients were able to seamlessly migrate from other on-premise solutions to the cloud, without compromising vital functionality. Although we now recommend using the official method Atlassian provides, this is a typical example of a custom solution Isos can offer when there are no upstream solutions available.

Insight itself is extremely malleable and can be utilized in a myriad of ways. Due to the extreme flexibility of Insight, implementing an effective asset management system can be a daunting task to tackle. At Isos Technology, we are able to provide the resources and guidance to help you implement a well-thought-out asset management schema and provide the expertise needed to implement Discovery scans across your corporate network.