For agile businesses using Jira, Jira Service Management ideally integrates customer and employee services with daily development work in Jira. It keeps customer service, developers, and operations staff aligned so that they can work more efficiently. However, service desk administrators may still run into difficulties keeping track of issues that need to be resolved when they’re working in a large Jira instance.
Using JQL for service management
Searching using Jira Query Language (JQL) helps with this, and Jira out-of-the-box allows you to create queries related to SLAs, which are key to service management. Included functions allow you to determine if the terms of the SLA are at risk of being breached or have ever been breached and how much time you have left to respond to a request.
You can also set custom issue types, such as “waiting for customer,” to search for issues requiring a customer response, like this:
project=”JQL Search Extensions” AND issuetype=”Waiting for customer”
But while using JQL out-of-the-box does make managing service requests easier for administrators, there are some things it can’t do. What if you want to find out whether a customer or agent was the last person to comment on an issue? How can you easily prioritize issues that may or may not be linked to SLAs? How can you find unresolved bugs linked to service desk issues? For that, you need an additional app like JQL Search Extensions for Jira.
Read on to learn the top queries you can use to keep track of who’s been commenting on certain issues, keep issues prioritized, and identify unresolved bugs related to common ticket requests.
Top JQL queries for service desk administrators and how to use them
When you’re managing requests from customers and employees and delegating tasks to agents, you don’t have time to sort through thousands of Jira issues. Use these queries to stay on top of everything.
Keeping Track of Issues Requiring a Response
1. commentLastCreatedOnDate
Sometimes issues can get overlooked if a customer takes a long time to respond to a comment or if someone forgets to update the status of an issue. You can use this query to find out if it’s been a few days since a comment was made on any current issues. If it has been, the customer or the agent probably needs a reminder.
Here’s an example of how to find an issue that hasn’t been commented on in the last three days:
commentLastCreatedOnDate < -3d
2. commentLastCreatedBy
This query shows you who last commented on an issue, whether it was a customer or a team member. You can use it to find comments made by members of a group or team or by a specific user. Here’s an example of a search combining this with commentLastCreatedOnDate:
commentLastCreatedOnDate < -1d AND commentLastCreatedBy not in membersof(jsd-operators-staff) AND resolution is EMPTY
It produces issues that haven’t been resolved yet and that were not commented on by a member of your Jira Service Desk staff. That means a customer was the last person to comment and is still waiting for a resolution.
Prioritizing Issues
3. linkType
This query will help you find linked issues that might be blocking high-priority tasks. For example, if there’s a blocker keeping your team from resolving a customer’s request, you can use this:
linkType = “Blocks”
4. linkedIssuesOfQuery
This query works well with statuses you’ve set that are unique to your SLAs, like ‘time to resolution.’ If issues in another project are linked to a support project, you might breach an SLA by not identifying this in time. For example, if a DEV project is linked to a support project and an SLA has been breached, you’d want to find any linked issues that caused this to happen. You can do this using the following:
project=DEV and issue in linkedIssuesOfQuery(“project=SUP and ‘Time to resolution’=breached()“)
5. hasSameUpdatedAndCreatedDate
Perhaps you want to check if requests have been responded to on the same day. This query will show you all the issues that were created and then updated on the same day. This means that most likely, the issue was responded to the same day the request was made. Here’s an example:
hasSameUpdatedAndCreatedDate = “true”
Finding Relations to Bugs
6. affectedVersion
When you know that certain versions of a product are affected by the same bug, it’s important to find out if you’re getting frequent support tickets about it to see if it’s an ongoing problem. To do this, use a query like this:
project=SUP and issue in linkedIssuesOfQuery(“affectedVersion=’2.0’“)
7. affectedVersionReleaseDate
Or you might be responding to tickets from beta testers rather than from customers. If there are major problems, you’ll want to know how much time there is to resolve them before the affected version is scheduled to be released. The query below will show you the affected version with a release date sometime in the future:
affectedVersionReleaseDate > now()
Wildcard Match to Find Custom Terms
- wildcardMatch
Finally, as a Jira Service Desk administrator, it’s helpful to be able to find issues with similar error patterns so you can predict and prevent future problems. To do this, you often need specific terms that aren’t easily searchable with out-of-the-box JQL. The wildcard match function allows you to create queries using any specific text. Adding an asterisk broadens the search to include variations on the terms. Here’s an example:
issue in wildcardMatch(“description”, “*/opt/app/*/logs/*“)
Use JQL Search Extensions to Provide Better Service
With JQL Search Extensions, you can easily manage all of your service desk issues and understand they’re related to bugs and development issues. Why not try some of these queries and see how they work for you? Try JQL Search Extensions free for 30 days.
Last updated: 2023-07-31
Daniel Turczanski
Daniel Turczanski is a Chief Product Architect at Appfire. He has over 10 years of experience in IT and as a software consultant in agile projects. He's been working on JQL Search Extensions leading the product and technical development.
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