Can’t upgrade to Jira Premium but still need an Asset Manager?
Read about our journey to find a suitable but cost effective alternative
By Matthew Littlefield
We recently made a switch to a new asset management tool that could cut your Atlassian bills significantly too. For a long time we were using Assets for Jira (previously known as Insights) as a means to track hardware and peripherals. When Insights was bought out by Atlassian and changed to a new pricing model that required a premium plan, we knew we wanted to keep our eyes peeled for any solutions more fitting for our smaller company.
We had some criteria in mind when looking around for a new service: we wanted it to be open-source, cheap or free for a small team, have lots of community support AND online documentation so we could support it ourselves, and ideally have an add-on which integrates it with Jira. This led us to Snipe-IT paired with the Snipe-IT for Jira add-on. This solution would allow our Jira Service Management users to easily select their assets through the portal, perfectly integrated with the rest of our Atlassian environment. And at less then $1 per licensed use, Snipe-IT is more cost effective than the others we’ve tested.
As for hosting costs for this server, we used a t2small AWS EC2 instance, which comes out to about half a cent per hour. And migration of our data was straightforward too. We just exported our assets from our Jira server instance and imported them into our new Snipe-IT instance. Although we had to play around with getting the fields mapped correctly, it was all very intuitive once set up.
Our only other requirement was Jira Service Management (Cloud) integration, which was also easy. It’s fantastic being able to pick out the hardware asset with a drop down menu in the Jira Service Management ticket or Portal. Each asset is easily distinguished from each other with titles, serial numbers, and pictures, making it really simple for our users and admins. We also found that including this field in our Service Desk Portal makes it easier for users to identify their assets when submitting support tickets. Our Service Desk Agents are easily able to identify which laptop, printer, or monitor is causing them problems, including that hardware’s unique history.
I hope our open source asset manager journey helps your company by showing there are other options out there. If you’re going through something similar, or need assistance with your Atlassian suite tools in general, just give me a call or send us an email. I’d be happy to help in any way I can.
HOS Atlassian Support
support@highordersolutions.com
972.294.7014×6500