Introduction

In the realm of IT management, organizations have long been accustomed to operating within distinct silos. Development teams focused on rapid delivery and innovation, while IT service management (ITSM) teams prioritized stability and reliability. However, a paradigm shift has occurred with the rise of DevOps practices, which emphasize collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery.

Recognizing the need for alignment and synergy between development and IT service processes, companies are increasingly combining DevOps and ITSM systems. This article explores the convergence of these two disciplines and delves into the transformative potential that arises when DevOps and ITSM join forces. By fostering collaboration, improving agility, and optimizing service delivery, this integration promises to revolutionize how organizations develop, deploy, and maintain their IT solutions.

An Overview of BMC Remedy and Jira

Customer success and business continuity depend on people  your people. As Simon Sinek said: Take care of your people and they will take care of your business. Long-term customer satisfaction depends on how fast and effective you resolve their issues. IT Service Management tools such as BMC Software are helping customer support teams to handle queries in the most efficient manner. Jira Software on the other hand helps DevOps teams get to know and resolve these queries faster.
BMC is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM tools in 2021 for an 8th consecutive year. Jira is the most preferred DevOps planning tool, and a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools for a 4th year in a row.

When using BMC Remedy and Jira it is essential to connect them to take full advantage of their capabilities. Integration platforms such as ZigiOps makes a potential Jira BMC Remedy integration easy and doable in a few clicks.

Here are some of the key benefits of Jira BMC Remedy integration:

• Sync all issues, events, alerts, CMDBs, change requests in real-time
• Eliminate manual work completely
• Enhance communication between ITSM & DevOps teams
• Automate systems workflows
• Resolve customer requests faster

To sum it up: A Jira BMC Remedy integration is executed for a variety of reasons. By integrating these two powerful systems, organizations can streamline their IT operations, improve collaboration between development and IT service management teams, enhance issue tracking and resolution processes, and achieve greater visibility into their IT workflows.

Additionally, the Jira BMC Remedy integration enables companies to leverage the strengths of both Jira and BMC Remedy, ultimately resulting in increased productivity, improved service quality, and efficient handling of IT incidents and change management. That's why the Jira BMC Remedy integration is a common occurrence.

What are the key advantages of Jira integration with the company's IT infrastructure?

Jira, a widely used project management and issue-tracking tool developed by Atlassian, offers numerous advantages for teams and organizations across various industries. Here are some of the key advantages of using Jira:

• Agile Project Management: Jira is built to support agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban. It allows teams to plan, track, and manage projects in an iterative and incremental manner, promoting flexibility and adaptability.
• Customizable Workflows: Jira allows users to design and customize workflows to match their specific processes and business needs. This flexibility enables teams to tailor Jira to their unique project management requirements.
• Issue and Bug Tracking: Jira excels in issue and bug tracking, providing a centralized platform to capture, prioritize, and resolve problems efficiently. It helps teams stay organized and maintain visibility into the status of issues.
• Collaboration and Communication: Jira promotes collaboration among team members and stakeholders. With features like comments, attachments, and @mentions, users can easily communicate, share information, and work together on tasks.
• Real-time Dashboards and Reporting: Jira offers real-time dashboards and reporting capabilities, providing teams and stakeholders with visual insights into project progress, performance, and key metrics.
• Integration with Other Tools: Jira seamlessly integrates with a wide range of tools, such as development, testing, and deployment tools. This integration streamlines workflows and ensures a smooth flow of information between different systems.
• Issue Prioritization and Planning: Jiras features, such as backlog prioritization, sprint planning, and release management, empower teams to efficiently plan and execute projects, making sure the most critical tasks are addressed first.
• Version Control Integration: Integration with version control systems like Git or Mercurial allows developers to associate code changes directly with issues or tasks in Jira, ensuring traceability and making it easier to track code-related issues.
• Extensive Add-ons and Marketplace: The Jira Marketplace offers a wide range of add-ons and plugins to extend the platforms functionality. These add-ons cater to specific needs, enabling users to enhance their Jira experience.
• Scalability: Jira is scalable and can handle projects and teams of various sizes. Whether its a small startup or a large enterprise, Jira can accommodate the needs of different organizations.
• Mobile Accessibility: Jira provides mobile applications for both Android and iOS, allowing users to access and manage projects on the go, improving productivity and responsiveness.
• Community Support: With a large and active user community, Jira users can find support, guidance, and best practices to make the most of the platform.

Why integrate BMC Remedy within the company's IT ecosystem?

Integrating BMC Remedy in the IT infrastructure offers several advantages that can significantly improve IT service management and overall business operations. Here are some of the key benefits of integrating BMC Remedy:

• Centralized IT Service Management: BMC Remedy provides a centralized platform for IT service management, allowing teams to handle incidents, problems, changes, and service requests from a single location. This centralized approach enhances efficiency and reduces complexities.
• Streamlined Incident Management: Integration with BMC Remedy streamlines incident management processes. It enables faster incident detection, assignment, and resolution, reducing downtime and improving service quality.
• Improved Problem Management: Integrating BMC Remedy enhances problem management capabilities. The platform helps in identifying the root causes of recurring incidents, leading to more effective problem resolution.
• Effective Change Management: BMC Remedy facilitates efficient change management by automating workflows and providing a clear view of planned changes and their impact on services. This minimizes the risk of disruptions during changes.
• ITIL Compliance: BMC Remedy is aligned with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) best practices. Integrating it into the IT infrastructure helps ensure ITIL compliance, enhancing the overall quality of IT service delivery.
• Automation and Workflows: BMC Remedy offers robust automation capabilities, allowing users to create workflows for routine tasks and approvals. Integration enables the automation of various IT processes, saving time and reducing manual efforts.
• Enhanced Service Level Management: Integration with BMC Remedy allows organizations to set up and monitor service level agreements (SLAs). This ensures that services are delivered within predefined response and resolution times, improving customer satisfaction.
• Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics: BMC Remedy provides advanced reporting and analytics features. By integrating it into the IT infrastructure, teams gain valuable insights into service performance, enabling data-driven decision-making.
• Knowledge Management: BMC Remedy facilitates knowledge sharing and management. Integration ensures that critical information, solutions, and best practices are easily accessible to IT teams and end-users.
• Seamless Communication and Collaboration: Integrating BMC Remedy fosters seamless communication and collaboration between different IT teams and departments. This promotes efficient problem-solving and decision-making.
• Auditing and Compliance: BMC Remedy provides robust auditing capabilities, allowing organizations to track changes and monitor activities related to IT service management. This is beneficial for compliance purposes and maintaining data integrity.
• Vendor and Asset Management: BMC Remedy includes features for vendor management and asset tracking. The integration enables better management of vendors, contracts, and IT assets, leading to cost optimization and improved asset lifecycle management.

Benefits of the Jira BMC Remedy integration

Integrating Jira and BMC Remedy offers several benefits, as it combines the strengths of both platforms to enhance IT service management and improve collaboration between teams. Here are some of the key advantages of Jira BMC Remedy integration:

• Streamlined IT Service Management: The integration allows seamless communication and data exchange between Jira and BMC Remedy, streamlining IT service management processes. This ensures that incidents, problems, and change requests are managed efficiently across both platforms.
• Efficient Incident Resolution: Integration enables IT teams to create, track, and manage incidents in either Jira or BMC Remedy, based on their preferences and workflows. This flexibility optimizes the incident resolution process, improving response times and reducing downtime.
• Collaboration between Teams: Jira and BMC Remedy are often used by different teams, such as development teams (Jira) and IT service teams (BMC Remedy). Integration fosters collaboration between these teams, promoting better communication and problem-solving.
• Real-time Data Synchronization: The integration ensures that data is synchronized in real-time between Jira and BMC Remedy. This means that changes made in one platform are immediately reflected in the other, avoiding data discrepancies and duplication.
• Improved Visibility and Reporting: With integrated data, reporting and analytics become more effective and comprehensive. Teams can generate consolidated reports that provide a holistic view of IT service management processes, enabling data-driven decision-making.
• Enhanced Change Management: Integrating change management processes between Jira and BMC Remedy enables better tracking and control of changes to IT services, reducing the risk of unauthorized or poorly managed changes.
• Unified Ticketing System: Integration allows for a unified ticketing system, where users can log incidents or service requests in either Jira or BMC Remedy, and the information is automatically synced, ensuring a consistent experience for end-users.
• Reduced Manual Effort: Integrating Jira and BMC Remedy automates data exchange and eliminates the need for manual data entry between the two systems. This reduces human errors and frees up resources for more strategic tasks.
• Flexibility in Workflow: The integration provides flexibility in configuring workflows to suit the organizations specific needs. Teams can define how information flows between Jira and BMC Remedy, adapting to their unique processes.
• ITIL Compliance: BMC Remedy is often used in organizations following ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) practices. Integrating with Jira, a popular agile project management tool, allows for ITIL compliance without sacrificing agile development methodologies.

Overall, a Jira BMC Remedy integration enhances the efficiency of IT service management, promotes collaboration, and improves visibility into IT operations. By leveraging the strengths of both platforms, organizations can deliver better IT services, resolve incidents faster, and optimize their IT workflows.

Common Jira BMC Remedy integration Use Case

The most common Jira BMC Remedy integration use case is synchronizing change requests or incidents between the two. Your ITSM and DevOps teams are separate units which means that each time an alert is triggered in BMC, most of the time it needs to be transferred to Jira. If your business is serving a lot of customers, a lot of alerts are going to be generated each day. You cannot expect your ITSM and DevOps teams to talk all the time and discuss these, right? This way they will have absolutely no time to actually do some work and fix those issues.

That's why you need to go the smart way and instead of making people speak, have BMC and Jira speak. Here are the top reasons why your company needs a Jira BMC Remedy integration:

• Save your employees a lot of time for repetitive tasks
• Eliminate chances of human error
• Let employees focus on the actual resolving of the issues

But let's take a look at how the Jira BMC Remedy integration works in reality:

When an event is triggered in BMC Remedy ZigiOps automatically picks it up and creates a related entity in Jira with all related fields. Once the development team updates the ticket, it will automatically get updated in BMC as well. Your ITSM and DevOps teams will be in full alignment during the entire process. Once developers fix the issue/fulfill the change request, the ITSM team will know it in real-time.

This is just an example of a very simple use case. We understand most companies are facing more challenging scenarios, which require syncing data between related entities of any level. That's why you need to choose a scalable and flexible integration platform. We will talk about that later.

Setup of Jira BMC Remedy integration with ZigiOps

Establishing the Jira BMC Remedy integration is easy and fun with ZigiOps. You can check out the video, which sums up the entire configuration process, or read how to do it step by step in the next lines. If you have a specific use case and would like to see how ZigiOps can resolve it schedule a 45-minute demo.

1. Installing the ZigiOps Integration Platform

You can install ZigiOps on-premise or request a trial. It connects to both on-prem and cloud deployments, no matter where your systems are. The installation process is easy and takes no more than 10 minutes. For more information on how to install our integration platform check the technical documentation.

To enter the ZigiOps, you'll need to fill in your username and password.

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After logging, you're transferred immediately to the ZigiOps platforms Dashboard. It contains all of the integration tools functionalities needed to establish a working connection between Jira and BMC Remedy.

The health menu, that's one of ZigiOps primar functionalities, offers a glimpse of the health status of the systems connected via ZigiOps, the current number of integration licenses as well as other critical data and metrics.

2. Connecting to your Remedy & Jira Instances

Next, you need to choose which systems you want to integrate and verify their API connections with ZigiOps. We are technology partners with all vendors for whom we provide integrations and ZigiOps uses only the official APIs.

3.Connecting to Jira

Before executing our successful Jira BMC Remedy integration, we need to connect to our Jira instance. For this to happen, well need to enter the following information:

• URL of our Jira instance
• Username
• Password

3. Integration Configuration & Mappings

Once you have successfully connected to your Remedy and Jira instances its time to configure the actual integration. ZigiOps offers predefined templates to cover each use case. All templates are fully customizable and permit the user to modify the integration at any given point.

4.Connecting to BMC Remedy

Connecting to BMC Remedy is the same as connecting to our Jira instance. The information needed is the same.

• URL of our Remedy instance
• Username
• Password

Once we connect to our preferred systems, we can test I the connection is working. During this action, ZigiOps will collect the initial metadata that will allow it to perform the Jira BMC Remedy integration without a fuss.

NB! We are technology partners with all vendors for whom we provide integrations and ZigiOps uses only the official APIs.

Integration Configuration & Mappings

Once you have successfully connected to your Remedy and Jira instances its time to configure the actual integration. There are two ways to execute this  by deploying a ZigiOps template or importing our own. Both ways work well for the integration platform.

ZigiOps comes with a large library of templates to cover each integration use case. All templates are fully customizable and permit the user to modify the integration at any given point.

You can choose from a wide variety of Remedy Jira integration templates. Some of the most popular ones are:

• Remedy Problem  Jira Task
• Remedy Change Request  Jira Task
• Remedy Work Order  Jira Task
• Jira Task  Remedy Incident

You can also create your Jira BMC Remedy integration from scratch if you prefer to do it this way. Once the template is loaded, its time to adjust the configuration per your use case.

You just need to select from which system you would like the transfer to begin (in this case its from Remedy to Jira, but ZigiOps supports bi-directional integrations so the opposite is also possible). Then you need to adjust the frequency, meaning to tell ZigiOps at what interval it should pull information from Remedy.

4. Jira BMC Remedy integration set-up

Next comes one of the most important steps of our Jira BMC Remedy integration (bi-directional connection). After loading the integration template its time to fill in the details. First, we have to point out BMC Remedy as our 1st system and Jira- as our second system.

Then, we have to point out the entities we'd like ZigiOps to transfer/sync between the connected systems.

On the BMC Remedy side, or Entity 1, we have the following:

• Properties
• Schema
• Srdattachment_properties
• Pbm_investigation_worklog
• Hpd_worklog
• Worklog_status_history_properties
• Incident
• Schemaprop
• Problem_status_history_properties
• Problem
• Incident_status_history_properties
• Etc.

On the Jira instances side, or Entity 2, we have:

• Proc.sub-task
• In.bug
• Demo.sub-task
• Cus.story
• Om.task
• Priority
• More..

Once we SAVE the chances we make in terms of data we want to transfer from BMC Remedy to Jira, we can proceed further with our Jira BMC Remedy integration.

There are couple of action levels Create Tasks, Enrich Incident, Backsync Incident and Update task.

When we choose the Create Task Action  we can tailor the trigger (how ZigiOps collects data), trigger conditions and expressions.

As mentioned above, ZigiOps is a highly customizable integration platform, which offers deep integrations, meaning you can relate fields and entities from all levels. You can transfer attachments, comments, priority, and all fields, which are available in both BMC and Jira. Once you are done with the configurations  click save and thats it.

Choosing the Best Integration Tool

Let's face it, choosing the best integration tool is not as easy as it seems. There are a lot of things you need to consider. Homegrown integrations are not recommended for complex use cases and bigger companies, since the actual R&D, development, testing and maintenance costs a lot more than buying a mature product.

Some integration vendors are not honest and give you false expectations on your integrations. Read more about this topic here.

Here are some key factors to consider when selecting a system integration tool:

1. Integration Capabilities: Ensure the tool supports the types of integrations you need, such as API-based integrations, data synchronization, real-time event-driven integration, and support for different data formats (JSON, XML, etc.).
2. Ease of Use: Look for a tool that is user-friendly and has a visual interface for designing and managing integrations. This is especially important if your integration team includes non-developers.
3. Scalability and Performance: Consider the tools ability to handle large volumes of data and transactions. It should be able to scale with your organizations growth and perform reliably under heavy loads.
4. Security and Compliance: Integration tools often handle sensitive data, so ensure the tool provides robust security features, encryption options, and compliance with industry standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA).
5. Connectivity and Protocol Support: Check if the tool supports various connectivity options like REST, SOAP, JDBC, FTP, etc., to accommodate different systems and data sources.
6. Pre-built Connectors and Adapters: Some integration tools offer pre-built connectors or adapters for popular systems, which can significantly speed up integration development.
7. Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Look for monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, such as real-time dashboards, logging, and error handling, to help identify and resolve integration issues efficiently.
8. Community and Support: Consider the availability of a strong user community and vendor support. A vibrant community can provide valuable resources, knowledge, and best practices.
9. Cost and Licensing: Evaluate the pricing model of the tool, including licensing fees, maintenance costs, and potential hidden charges based on data volumes or API calls.
10. Integration with Existing Tools: If you already have other tools or platforms in use (e.g., CRM, ERP, etc.), check if the integration tool can seamlessly connect with them.
11. Customization and Extensibility: Assess whether the integration tool allows custom code or scripting if your integration requirements go beyond the tools standard features.
12. Vendor Reputation and Longevity: Research the vendors reputation, customer reviews, and how long they have been in the market to ensure their long-term commitment to the product.
13. Future-proofing: Choose a tool that aligns with your organizations future technology and integration needs, ensuring it can adapt to changing technologies and standards.

The ZigiOps integration platform fits in all of the above-mentioned criteria.

As an integration platform, ZigiOps gives you the full flexibility to create powerful integrations with no code. Priced in the medium to low segment it has proven itself as the perfect tool to connect your systems. Check out our customer portfolio.

Some of the key features companies choose us for are:

• Simplicity  You control your integrations entirely in the UI

• Powerful  ZigiOps can transfer as many events as your instances pass to it

• Fully customizable  Adapting and scaling your integrations has never been easier

• Secure  Our platform doesn't have a database and doesn't store any customer information

Check ZigiOps by yourself and see how it works. We offer a free trial or free PoC.