By default, agents and admins working on Service Management projects and occasionally acting as customers won’t receive any notifications about internal comments or changes unless these changes are publicly visible. This is confusing for some of our users, so we want to show you how to change that by using features already available in Jira.

Definitions

In this article, we’ll be referring to two types of notifications, so here’s what they mean:

• Jira notifications: General notifications shared between all Jira applications. These notifications are designed to keep team members informed about progress on particular tickets. They usually include notifications about issue updates (new information, comments, etc.) or work progress (started, stopped, etc.)

• Jira Service Management / Customer notifications: Notifications specific to Jira Service Management. These notifications are designed to keep the customers informed about progress on particular tickets without disclosing information about internal processes. They usually include responses to customers, customer-visible changes, approvals, or requests being shared with individuals or organizations.

Context

If you need more details about how Jira Service Management and Jira notifications work together, see Managing Service Management notifications. For the purpose of this article, let’s just focus on this section:

Agents and admins

When agents and admins work on a request, they receive notifications as part of the project's notification scheme.

Agents don't receive notifications on their own changes when they act as a customer on issues with a set request type. Jira Service Management treats agents acting as a reporter, participant or approver on these issues as a customer. This occurs regardless of the notification scheme.

Agents who are part of an organization will only receive a customer notification when a request is shared with that organization. If the agent is the assignee of the issue, they won't receive any notifications from the project's Jira notification scheme.

In other words, Jira Service Management blocks Jira notifications for agents who meet the Jira Service Management customer criteria on a ticket, that is act as:

• Reporter

• Request Participant

• Approver

• Part of customer organization the ticket is shared with

This means that agents won’t receive any notifications about internal comments or changes to the ticket unless these changes are visible to customers as well. Some admins see this behavior as counter-intuitive or incorrect.

Enabling notifications for agents acting as customers

Let’s configure Jira to send Jira notifications about all internal activity on a ticket to agents who are a Request Participant, Approver, or part of a customer organization the ticket is shared with, but not the Reporter. For Reporters, we’ll just send the Jira Service Management’s customer notifications to avoid duplicate notifications.

Step 1. Choose to send all notifications to customers

In this step, we’ll configure Jira to send both Jira Service Management and Jira notifications to customers.

1. Go to Administration > Applications > Configuration (under Jira Service Management).

2. In the Notifications section, select the option to send both Jira Service Management and Jira notifications to customers (called Yes, send customers both Jira Service Management and Jira notifications):

   

   
   

Step 2. Create a new notification scheme

Assuming you’re using the default notification scheme, some notifications will be duplicated because both Jira and Jira Service Management will try to notify the Reporter of a ticket (a role shared by these two applications) about updates. We can avoid that by limiting the Reporter’s notifications to only Jira Service Management’s customer notifications. To do that, we’ll create a new notification scheme.

1. Go to Administration > Issues > Notification schemes.

2. Click Add notification scheme.

3. Give it a name and description, and click Add.

4. Select all events you’d like to notify users about. In our case, we’ll select all events and notify All Watchers and Current Assignee (note that we’re leaving Reporter out). 

   

Step 3. Assign the scheme to all Service Management projects

1. Open a project, and go to Project settings > Notifications.

2. Click Actions > Use a different scheme. 

   

3. Select the new scheme and click Associate.

4. Repeat these steps for every Service Management project.

Resulting changes in notifications

Let’s have a look at how the notifications changed for different roles.

Duplicate notifications for agents who are watchers or assignees

With this configuration, agents who are watchers or assignees may receive duplicate notifications. However, agents are fully in control of that now as they become watchers or assignees by choice.

Also, the only scenario in which agents receive duplicate notifications for the same action is when all of the following criteria are met:

• The agent is a watcher or an assignee of a ticket

• They are subscribed to customer notifications

• The event is public (e.g. public comment)

If duplicates are too much, customers (and agents) can unsubscribe from notifications at any moment, the link is always available on the Customer Portal and in all customer notifications they receive. This doesn’t apply to Reporters, as they will always receive customer notifications, regardless of their subscription status.

What if I add customers as watchers or assignees?

Jira Service Management permission settings will prevent you from doing that (unless you’ve changed them), so no sensitive data will be sent to your customers through notifications.