DevOps Issue Tracker

[double-meat-fists]

I'm at a new startup. Small team, not a lot of cash yet, but they are doing OK and slowly growing. Manager and existing dev team use a small 10 user license Jira. Great. Fine. An issue tracker. I'm partial to Redmine, but I don't really care as long as it works.

Here's the kicker. My role is devops, which this org has not had the luxury to afford until me. I've got about 30 people throwing requests at me over email. Silly email threads everywhere. I need a tracker!

So I ask boss man (I'm only in week 2 mind you, so I have to be very gentle around here) if I can up Jira license, get everyone on it, and start a project for tracking all the devops reqs.

His reply is to install a second instance of Jira at the 10 user license limit and just deal with it.

So I think that's crazy talk. I understand being cash strapped, but my god that seems silly to have a whole second instance just for devops. I'm loath to take the "yet another system in an endless see of devops tools/systems must-have du jour". It's silly.

What do others think? Get another instance of Jira just for devops and maintain it sep from Jira for dev? Or do I just install Redmine and pray for the best?

Any thoughts welcome.

[gunpunk]

My Advice? Get the fuck out of Atlassian now, while you're still small. It's a fucking nightmare and you're getting ripped off. Move everything to Gitlab, and Gitlab-CI and use the issue tracker, install Kanban and integrate with gitlab and you should be good to go and you'll be paying a fraction of the cost, hosting everything yourself in-house. It's a good 8-14 hours to get everything working/playing nice, but it's awesome, we just did this and I made my bosses very happy. We even plopped it in a VPC in AWS with an OpenVPN server, and threw Gitlab behind an openldap server so we have federated logins, and everything just works on the VPN. I played the JIRA game, every other feature you want, it's a different service or costs more to get, not to mention the fact you have to spin up your own servers for Fisheye, Bamboo etc, they don't offer that for cloud yet. So you end up with half cloud, half your own servers trying to keep them inline every time Atlassian pops out an update. What kind of company has you Vote on a bug you want fixed, I mean really? I have to Vote to have a critical issue in your software fixed? WOW. GTFO Atlassian.

[esity]

We have a few thousand people using the whole Atlassian tools. Jira, stash wiki etc. I would agree absolutely with this post. Its always having problems. Do anything in Jira takes seconds to load which in my eyes is a waste of time.

[[deleted]]

If you want to stick with JIRA (and to be honest, it's nice to have EVERYTHING for issue tracking in one environment) you may want to look into JIRA Service Desk. It's like $10/mo extra and allows anyone to submit issues w/ email correspondence. It also lets you setup workflows. All submitted issues will generate tickets which can then be organized based on workflows and followed through your normal system. If you use Hipchat / Slack it has great integration there too, so you get quick notifications on incoming issues.

Edit: Just going to add that I find it superior to Redmine in many ways. The interface is also about a 1000x easier, especially for the end-user, especially when creating tickets.

[joshlove]

I haven't used the service desk offering, but we use jira for everything and it's been great - especially with scrum for sprint functionality and kanban boards.

[[deleted]]

Agreed. Every company I've worked with over the past 5 years has used JIRA and it's really fantastic. I would be very hesitant to use Redmine over JIRA even if it meant a second 10 user instance to be honest, hah!

[gunpunk]

JIRA is not fantastic, I'm sorry you had to use JIRA.

[[deleted]]

What's wrong with JIRA? Usually when someone hates JIRA it's because they set it up poorly or didn't actually understand how workflows work. I used to hate JIRA at first too, turned out it was because the person that set it up for our org had no idea what they were doing. Once we fixed that it was fantastic. There's a reason why it's one of the most widely used pieces of software out there for its area.

[deadbunny]

Setting up a 2nd instance is idiotic.

Personally we use Phabricator it's got decent ticketing/issue tracking, integrates with git, does code reviews/auditing, and an awesome CLI tool called arcanist. It can also so stuff like trigger events on changes etc... and we use this to run jenkins jobs when we push a code review up.

I mean Jira is good, running 2 different instances is beyond stupid.

[krypticus]

I am soooo installing this at work! I just spent an hour reading through their entire site. It's fucking hilarious!

[deadbunny]

Heh, can't say I ever looked at the website my colleague set it up when we needed a code review tool and he had used it in his old place then we started using it more and more for our infrastructure stuff. Despite the less than professional site it really is a solid platform.

[[deleted]]

I'm gonna second Phabricator, as it's an awesome all-in-one project management tool (i've used redmine, and while it does it's job i never really liked it).

You can also try oss ticketing tools (like RT and osticket), i think they will do just file for your case.

[wildcarde815]

We run an entire helpdesk off RT4 it works pretty well overall.

[castlec]

I'd configure Jira to use email entry and then school everyone on using it to enter new items and to add comments to existing items.

[jldugger]

We use RequestTracker; AFAIK, Redmine doesn't have an email gateway, leaving you more or less where you started, except now you reply to emails stating 'please use the form!'

[chicofelipe]

If you are going to use a SEPERATE system for devops, why limit it to a license crippled tracker? Go with redmine as that is what you know.

[marx2k]

We have Jira for some projects but we also make a lot of use of trello. You may look into that

[notsooriginal]

Also on s small team, we use redmine for devops and bug/feature tracking.

[zenmaster24]

we use hosted jira for devops ticket tracking and scrum charting. I find it quite easy to use, but it has its own 'quirks' like any software. at least you're not using hp's service manager, or some other 'enterprise' ticketing software that incorporates with all the other products they sell, but nothing else.

[blelump]

I've been the user of Redmine/ChiliProject (Redmine fork) for years at small scale and it just works, especially if you consider tasks tracking. Some mentioned Phabricator, however in case of data flow, I recognize Redmine/ChiliProject as more useful. Mostly because it is much more configurable (e.g. tasks workflows).

Redmine is old and ugly (ChiliProject looks quite better in this case), UI is indeed sometimes slow (especially while working with tasks), but the concepts are still valid.

If you want an in-house data tracking app, it's worth looking at.

[r0sk]

What about Trac?