As soon as an ITSM approach is deployed, the question of automating the processes arises. Which tool should you choose between Microsoft and Atlassian: Power Automate or Jira Automation?
Jira has an embedded automation engine:Automation. We have chosen to compare it to a leading tool on the process automation market: Power Automate, provided natively in the Microsoft 365 suite.
Our consultants Gwendoline GONZALEZ (ITSM expert and Atlassian consultant) and Damien CELLE (Office 365 consultant) give you their opinion through 4 use cases listed below:
- Custom post in Teams when creating a request in a project;
- Automatic deduplication of requests;
- Creating a task in the To-Do (Office 365) of the person to whom a request is assigned;
- Production of a software with validation of the dev team / ops team / business team.
They will provide a brief description of the implementation of these use cases in the tools. Their comparison between Jira Automation and Power Automate will be done according to different criteria: design, maintainability, performance and monitoring.
1) Custom post in Teams when creating a request in a project: which tool allows the simplest automation, Jira Automation or Power Automate?
Teams offers natively, via its connectors module, to be notified in a channel as soon as you have an interaction on a Jira project. However, the notifications are a bit "austere" and are not customizable. The idea is therefore to use an automation mechanism to improve these notifications.
How it works in Automation :
It is necessary to proceed in 2 steps:
- First, make sure you have the "Incoming Webhook" connector set up in the Teams channel, to retrieve the URL of the channel to pass into the automation.
- Then create the automation, taking care to define the trigger and the execution conditions.
When we define the action, we will have to pass as parameters: the URL of the channel (retrieved during the configuration of the Webhook), as well as the title and the body of the notification (where we have the possibility to include smartvalues to display the parameters of the ticket). We can also include the ticket summary to the notification. However, this summary is not configurable in Jira unlike Power Automate which allows you to customize this.
How it works in Power Automate:
In Power Automate, our flow will be triggered when a request is created in a Jira project. We will then have a Teams action to format and send the message. So we have a very simple flow with a trigger and an action (or two, if there is a specific condition). An informed user will do this implementation in about ten minutes.
In summary:
| Jira Automation | Power Automat | |
| Design | + | ++ |
| Maintainability | + | + |
| Performance | + | + |
| Follow-up | + | ++ |
Winner of the round: Power Automate.
Note Atlassian has recently acquired Halp. This tool will allow :
- Synchronize Jira tickets with conversations in Teams or Slack,
- To be able to track these tickets directly from Teams or Slack,
- To be able to trigger the creation of a ticket in Jira directly from a Teams or Slack conversation.
In short, Halp allows employees from a collaborative environment (Teams or Slack) to interact seamlessly with Jira.
2) Automatic request deduplication: the difference between Jira Automation and Power Automate
It is not uncommon to see the same request arrive several times on a project, especially when creating tickets by email via supervision systems. If this is regularly the case, it is interesting to implement an automatic deduplication mechanism. This will define what a duplicate is, according to selected fields. Then it will add the duplicates as child tickets of the "reference" ticket, taking care to close them.
How it works in Jira Automation:
Assuming that the most recent ticket is the ticket to keep.
Each time a ticket is created, we will have to :
- Store in a local variable the ticket key that triggered the automation.
- Validate if there are duplicates according to the criteria defined beforehand.
- Define a series of actions, for all the tickets answering the JQL query of duplicate search, excluding the ticket that triggered the automation:
- Create a link between the reference ticket and the duplicate tickets (you can define a particular type of link) Transmit the duplicate tickets to the Completed state
- Add a comment to specify that the tickets meeting the JQL filter are duplicates
The implementation can be complex depending on the deduplication rules defined: what is the reference ticket, what are the conditions to check to identify a duplicate, etc..
How it works in Power Automate:
We can't retrieve the requests with a JQL query. The idea will be to make an automated flow at each creation of request, and to put in an external system (type SharePoint list or Excel file) the follow-up of the columns to deduplicate. Each time we identify a duplicate, we update the concerned requests. For this use case, Power Automate is clearly not adapted because it requires the use of a third party storage to be able to make comparisons.
In summary:
| Jira Automation | Power Automat | |
| Design | + | - |
| Maintainability | + | - |
| Performance | + | - |
| Follow-up | + | + |
Winner of the round: Jira Automation.
3) Creation of a task in the To-Do (Office 365) of the person to whom a request is assigned
To-Do is a tool provided in the Microsoft 365 suite that allows you to manage your personal tasks and organize your day according to the tasks to be performed. In an ITSM approach, the requests assigned to employees lead to tasks that they will have to perform. For a better organization, it is interesting to automatically integrate these tasks in the To-Do of the person to whom a new request is assigned.
How it works in Jira Automation:
With Jira Automation, we are able to define a webhook to an external tool provided that there is an API available. This is the case for To-Do with the Microsoft Graph API. This requires knowledge of REST service integration and authentication on Azure AD. This is not necessarily obvious to a non-technical audience.
How it works in Power Automate:
Like the first use case with Teams, the idea is to make an automated flow with the creation of a request in Jira as a trigger (Premium connector) and then adding a task creation action in To-Do. The flow is very simple with one trigger and one action (or two if you add a condition).
In summary:
| Jira Automation | Power Automat | |
| Design | - | ++ |
| Maintainability | - | ++ |
| Performance | ++ | + |
| Follow-up | - | + |
Winner of the round: Power Automate.
4) Software production with validation by the dev team / ops team / business team: use Jira Automation or Power Automate?
The aim here is to implement a simple process for putting a software product into production. This release is initiated by a request (via a form). To be validated, it must be approved by a dev team (which will say that everything is ready on the code side), an ops team (everything is ready on the infrastructure side) and a business team (all functional tests are OK).
How it works in Jira Automation:
When the validation circuit is always the same and the validations are sequential, we can embed it directly in the workflow.
Jira Automation will be of interest when we need to manage validations according to a number of parameters. For example: in a MEP for a given software, I need to have only the Dev and business validation.
To manage this kind of validation circuit in automatic, we will need :
- Define the order of the validations (if they are all to be performed)
- To set up a "Waiting for validation" state in our workflow
- To create the necessary automation, so that as soon as the ticket arrives in "waiting for validation", and according to the validations already carried out, the automation can send the ticket towards the good validation.
It will also be necessary to define what to do with the ticket in case of a validation refusal.
- As soon as the first validation is refused, the ticket is changed to refuse.
- Manage with flags the status of validations, and let a team define if the request should go further or not.
How it works in Power Automate:
The business complexity of this flow is quite high. However, it is well adapted to Power Automate because of its native approval mechanism. We therefore have a flow that is triggered either instantly (button), or by filling out a production request form (Forms or SharePoint for example). And a set of consecutive approval actions (dev, ops, business). The advantage of this mechanism is that you can send the approval to a group of users who will then approve it*. The notification is automatically sent to Teams and to the email of the approvers. What can be limiting with Power Automate is having to manage returns to intermediate statuses. For example, the business team refuses the approval and the automation approval goes back to ops. In summary, if we keep the nominal scenario, everything is simple. But if you add rules, it becomes a real headache.
*Either the first approver validates, or it will be everyone.
In summary:
| Jira Automation | Power Automat | |
| Design | ++ | + |
| Maintainability | + | - |
| Performance | + | + |
| Follow-up | ++ | ++ |
Winner of the round: Jira Automation.
The result: Jira Automation or Power Automate?
That's two sets everywhere. As you can see, there is no one tool that we prefer more than the other. Each of the two tools has its strengths and weaknesses:
- Jira Automation is a bit more technical and complex to use than Power Automate.
- Power Automate will not be of any use if you want to automate things related to Jira plugins (like Insights for example).
- The Jira connector in Power Automate requires a Premium license, the cost of which should be considered in relation to the value provided by the processes.
- The integration with Office 365 tools is very successful with Power Automate.
-> Beware of tool costs!
Another important point, which is not specific to use cases, is the cost of the tools. Jira Automation is integrated in the Jira Cloud subscriptions:
- On all subscriptions, for single-project rules,
- From the Premium subscription which offers the possibility to use multi-project rules, (not concerned in our use cases). Attention, in Premium, we are limited to 1000 executions per user and per month, while in Enterprise the number of executions is unlimited.
The Jira connector in Power Automate is in Premium mode. This means that the company will have to subscribe to a Power Automate Premium license (per user at 12.60 € / month or per flow at 84.30 € / month). The choice of license depends on the number of users and flows concerned.
Our opinion
In summary, Power Automate is best used for simple use cases. That is to say that these are more likely to be realized by business users. (link with article on key users)
Its value will be even greater with an integration in the Office 365 tools. However, if the process to be implemented is more complex or needs to interact with a Jira plugin, then you will have to turn to Jira Automation.
Process automation often brings value to existing work methods and it is not easy to find your way around. Do not hesitate to contact Gwendoline or Damien for more information.
