Understanding watchers and request participants

Platform Notice: Cloud - This article applies to Atlassian products on the cloud platform.


What is the difference between watchers and request participants? This is often a question that comes up. In this article, I will attempt to explain the differences between these two fields to facilitate better understanding.


Request participants apply only to Jira Service Management projects while Watchers apply to both Jira Service Management and Jira software and business projects.


Request Participants:

  • This field usually includes customers. Customers are unlicensed users able to view the tickets in the portal only and do not have access to the internal agent view. 
  • Anyone that has access to the project can be added as a request participant and customers can add participants on the ticket through the portal as well.
  • A customer can be added as a Requested Participant by using the "Share" function in the portal.  There are restrictions on if/who customers can share with based upon the customer sharing settings selected in the Jira Service Management project. 
  • The request participants' access to view/participate would be through the portal only.
  • Request participants can:
    • also be added by including the email address in the cc field when the customer replies to an email. The users included in the cc field are added as request participants if the customer sharing settings allow it.
    • only be removed from an issue by a user with edit issue permissions.
    • only view and add public comments. The request participants do not have the permission to view internal comments.
    • access the tickets where they are a participant on, by using the filter 'Where I am a participant' from the Requests section in the portal as shown below:


Watchers:

  • A Watcher is a user that will be given permissions for the Jira project. The watcher field is widely used in Jira projects and is also available to be used in Jira Service Management projects.
  • Watchers are licensed users who have access to the internal Jira view.
  • Watchers can:
    • view and add internal comments since they have access to the internal agent view. They can also view and add public comments.
    • be added by any user with a Manage watchers permission. 
    • stop watching the ticket by themselves and such a user does not need to be removed by someone else.
    • view all the tickets they are watching by creating and saving a filter as shown below:



The following article may be helpful in understanding what notifications the watchers and request participants receive:

Basically, in Jira Service Management,

Useful References:

Last modified on Apr 30, 2024

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