Integrating with Jira Data Center

You can integrate with Jira Software Data Center or Jira Service Management Data Center by using the Plugins2 (P2) framework for building apps and taking advantage of various Jira features and services. This overview covers everything you need to know about the integration with Jira. If you already know how to integrate with Jira and want to build your first app, skip this part and check out our Getting started guide.

What is Jira Data Center?

Jira Data Center is the enterprise implementation of Jira, providing high availability and performance at scale. It includes two Jira applications: Jira Software Data Center and Jira Service Management Data Center. Each application delivers a tailored experience for its users and has an associated project type, which in turn, offers application-specific features.

Jira Software Data Center helps software teams plan, track, and release software. It features integration with development tools, an agile board, and a release hub for software version release.

Jira Service Management Data Center helps service teams as a service solution, from asset management to DevOps. It features Service Level Agreements (SLAs), a customizable web portal for customers, and permission schemes allowing customer access.

Learn more about the differences between Jira Data Center applications

What is Jira Platform?

Jira Software and Jira Service Management are built on the Jira Platform. Jira Platform provides base functionalities that are shared across both Jira applications, like issues, workflows, search, or email. A Jira application is an extension of the Jira Platform that provides specific functionality. For example:

• Jira Software adds boards, reports, development tool integration, and other agile software development features.
• Jira Service Management adds customer request portals, support queues, SLAs, a knowledge base, and automation.

This means that when you develop for any Jira application, you’re actually integrating with the Jira application as well as the Jira Platform. The Jira applications and Jira Platform have their own REST APIs, webhook events, and web fragments.

Integrating apps

You can build an app for Jira by using the Atlassian Plugin software developer kit (SDK) that includes the Plugins2 (P2) framework. The P2 framework is a bundle of code, resources, and configuration files that you can install in your Jira instance. With P2, you can add content or features, make secure requests to Jira's APIs, and listen and respond to webhooks. Learn more about P2 components

The basic development flow for building an app using the Atlassian SDK is:

1. Create your app project by using the atlas-create-jira-plugin script.
2. Add needed Jira modules or common modules, like web panel, by using the atlas-create-jira-plugin-module script. Learn more about Jira modules
3. Build and test your app by running the atlas-package script from the project root directory.
4. Configure AMPS with Jira. Learn how to configure AMPS to run Jira with additional applications installed
5. Launch Jira. For early development and testing, you can quickly spin up a Jira instance by running atlas-run-standalone --product jira --version x.x.x., where --version x.x.x. is your Jira version. For example: --version 9.11.3..
6. Log in to Jira as an administrator by using the default username and password combination of admin/admin.
7. Install the app you built with the atlas-package command. There are two ways you can do this:
   • Go to the Administration console > Manage add-ons > Upload add-on and choose the .jar file that the atlas-package command generated for you. You'll find the .jar file in the target directory of your project home after running atlas-package.
   • In the terminal, go to your project’s home directory and run the atlas-install-plugin script. Make sure you’ve already built your app .jar file using the atlas-package SDK command.

You should now be able to see your app in the Jira UI. Every time you change your app code or resource, reload your app by running the atlas-package command again. Then, remove and reinstall the app .jar file from the Manage add-ons page.

Other considerations

If you’re building an app with P2, you'll also need to:

• Design your app: With our design guidelines, you’ll keep your app visually compatible with the Atlassian applications' design.
  • Check out our Atlassian Design Guidelines
  • Check out the Atlassian User Interface (AUI) components
• Implement security: With secure integrations, you’ll protect customer data from unauthorized access and from malicious or accidental changes. Learn more about security in Jira
• Make your app available: With the Atlassian Marketplace, you can share and sell your Jira apps. You gain access to our customer base, who can browse the Marketplace for apps to enhance the functionality of their Atlassian products. Learn more about Atlassian Marketplace

Building blocks

The four building blocks of integrating with Jira Data Center are the APIs, webhooks, modules, and entity properties.

APIs

The Jira Data Center APIs let your integration communicate with your Jira:

• Jira REST API: Use for most integrations. For example, by using the REST API, you can write a script that moves issues from one sprint to another.
• Jira Java API: Use when you’re building a P2 app.
• Jira front-end API: Use when you’re building the UI in your app.

Webhooks and automation rules

Webhooks are outgoing messages from Jira that enable your app to react to conditions or events, like transitioning an issue or closing a sprint. Apps can also react to them in Jira through automation rules. You can implement an automation that performs actions in a remote system as part of an automation rule. You can also configure an automation rule to trigger a webhook that notifies your app. For more information about webhooks, see:

• Jira Software webhooks
• Jira Service Management webhooks

Modules

Modules are the UI elements, such as a tab or menu. Jira UI modules allow apps to interact with the Jira UI. For example, your app can use a Jira UI module to add a new dropdown menu to a board. Learn more about Jira modules

Entity properties

Entity properties are key-value stores attached to Jira objects that can be created, updated, and deleted through the Jira REST APIs. This system allows for data storage on the Jira host and supports imports, exports, and migrations between instances. The data is stored locally with the Jira instance, ensuring its availability for use. Learn more about entity properties

Looking for inspiration?

If you are looking for ideas on building the next Jira Data Center integration, the following use cases and examples may help.

Jira Software app integration ideas

Here are a few examples of Jira Software use cases:

• Scrum boards: Agile teams can break large, complex projects into manageable pieces of work so focused teams ship faster.
• Kanban boards: Agile and DevOps teams can use flexible kanban boards to visualize workflows, limit work-in-progress, and maximize efficiency as a team. Templates make it easy to get started quickly and customize as you go.
• Sprint reporting: IT teams can determine if the team is overcommitted to reduce excessive scope creep and can better understand completed work in each sprint.

Here are a few examples of what you can build on top of Jira Software:

• Retrospective tools for Jira: Tools for reviewing the project history. With the Jira Software API, they're able to filter by board or overlay the swimlanes.
• Epic summary: Panel that allows to review the progress of epics or issues within the epics.
• Planner for Jira: Tool for fetching the information from boards, epics, and backlogs using the Jira Software API that allows to plan work by a team member.

Jira Service Management app integration ideas

Here are a few examples of Jira Service Management use cases:

• Support helpdesk: An easy way to provide support to anyone in the organization with IT requests, such as hardware or software requests.
• Asset management: IT teams want to discover, control, monitor, and track key IT assets such as hardware and servers.
• DevOps: Developer, Operations, and IT teams can use Jira Service Management to collaborate together and solve problems faster.
• Business teams: Finance and HR teams can use Jira Service Management to collect requests from anyone in the organization.

Here are a few examples of what you can build on top of Jira Service Management:

• Customer portal customization: Jira Service Management provides an intuitive customer portal that makes it easy for non-technical end users to interact with service teams like IT and support. By extending this, you can build a completely tailored interface for the customer portal that matches your company's branding.
• Collect requests outside of Jira Service Management: Build functionality to create requests on behalf of customers in any number of ways. For example, integrate it into the support section of your website, have a “get help” menu on your mobile plugin, or hook up alerts from a system monitoring tool to create incidents.
• SLA integration: Jira Service Management introduces the notion of service level agreements (SLAs) by letting teams accurately measure and set goals based on time metrics, such as time to assign or time to respond. With the Jira Service Management REST API, you can now get detailed SLA information and create your own reports.

For more ideas, you can also:

• Check our Learning section
• Join the discussion on Atlassian Developer Community