Monitoring and reporting

Some of the largest organizations in the world standardize on Confluence Data Center to enable collaboration and content sharing across their enterprise. As enterprises host more of their work on Confluence, establishing the right permissions and maintaining visibility over your growing number of spaces and pages helps ensure your sensitive information is staying secure and compliant; so your teams can focus on being effective. With the ability to track permissions activity and much more, Confluence Data Center allows admins to expand their audit event coverage by 133%, giving them the security-relevant digital records needed to help demonstrate compliance, improve security, and optimize workflow.

When you don’t have the information you need, work slows down

More and more enterprises are turning to Confluence as a space for teams to document, share, and collaborate on work, but when usage spans the entire organization, it can be difficult to stay on top of every event taking place. Pages are deleted or moved, spaces are re-named, permissions change daily; while these actions seem easy enough to track on their own, when you consider the frequency of requests to resolve issues like this at enterprise scale, it’s suddenly not so palatable.

Whether you’re an admin or a space admin, requests like these inevitably pile up and can be a hindrance on efficiency; not just for you, but for the teams you’re supporting. When a team comes to you having trouble accessing pages they need permission to, you need to understand who owns the page and can grant them the permission they need, as well as who (and when) these permissions were last changed, to make sure there wasn’t a specific reason the page required restrictions.

If you’re a global admin you have the ability to view any and all spaces to resolve this problem, but as an admin or space admin, you may be restricted to a single space, making it even more difficult to provide this team the information and resolution they need to get back to work.

Without a convenient way to access information like who edited permissions and who has the ability to change them back, you’re inadvertently causing teams to slow down. When work lives and flows through Confluence, a misplaced page or permission restrictions can create an unnecessary bottleneck, and the onus is on you to free it up.

Unblocking your teams' ability to work efficiently

With advanced auditing capabilities in Confluence Data Center, you can get the information you need quickly by leveraging the comprehensive audit log and permissions event coverage. With the ability to track events at the team level, you can quickly identify who changed what and when, and resolve the issues that block teams from getting work done. You can even revert to native audit logs within Confluence rather than filtering through a log file on a disk, making the user’s access activity as easy to find as populating a search box.

An added benefit of of the extended audit coverage provided by advanced auditing is the ability to identify holes in your user management process that may have led to these permissions problems in the first place. So not only are you able to perform ad hoc audits to resolve issues quicker, but you’re able to perform a broader user management audit so your organization can take action and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Understanding these discrepancies can help inform your user management processes in the future to enable a more streamlined flow of work, uninterrupted by process oversight.

Last but not least, advanced auditing provides a delegated view, so that you can now see all of the audit events within your organization’s spaces - meaning if you’re a space admin, you no longer have to get in touch with the global admin to check on who did what outside of your space.

Permissions are an important element of any product being deployed across an enterprise, however when work exists and flows through Confluence the way it does - with so many team members involved and contributing - the need for a detailed, digital-record that examines all permissions and supporting actions should be high on your list.

Learn more about advanced auditing in Confluence Data Center here.

Apps and extensibility

At its core, Confluence helps teams create, collaborate, and organize work in one space, but one of its biggest values is the ability to serve multiple uses. Whether it’s deployed as a source for technical documentation, a social intranet, a knowledge base, or some kind of amalgam of the three, Confluence and customization go hand-in-hand.

Some of the largest organizations in the world standardize on Confluence Data Center to enable collaboration and content sharing at scale across their enterprise. However, as enterprises host more of their work on Confluence, there can be unique challenges based how it’s being used. We understand that we cannot account for every scenario imaginable, which is exactly why Confluence Data Center is built with extensibility and customization in its fabric.

Improving knowledge discoverability for ITSM

When done right, creating a proactive, self-service knowledge base can dramatically lower the number of issues in your support queue and save IT teams hours of work. Not only does it help save agents from answering repetitive questions, but they empower them to focus their time on more complex challenges, creating long-term value rather than putting out fires.

While knowledge management provides myriad benefits, it is an ongoing responsibility that requires you to think about what happens with all of that content over time. Even after you’ve implemented a system, there’s a constant cycle of adding new material and eliminating items that are outdated or obsolete, and this especially the case for enterprise organizations.

When you have 10,000+ users or customers relying on your Confluence instance as a knowledge base, ensuring the discoverability and relevance of your content as you scale is paramount for Confluence to be effective.

Monitoring and reporting

Enterprises organizations rely on Jira Service Management Data Center to deliver excellent service and keep work flowing for IT and non-IT teams alike. As more teams begin to operate as service providers and more service desks are created, maintaining and keeping them running smoothly, securely, and in compliance with internal and external regulations becomes more challenging.

Keeping track of changes to your SLAs

Setting up and managing service level agreements (SLAs) is essential to delivering high quality service to your employees, customers, or other organizations. To create SLAs for your internal teams, you need to work collaboratively to define the services that are available and the responsiveness that your teams can expect. For customers and other organizations you serve, this level of service and responsiveness is agreed upon as part of the licence or contract agreement in place. In a large organization, there can be hundreds of SLAs that need to be managed in Jira Service Management - each with a varying degree of complexity around when the clock starts and stops and what the goal is. 

When an SLA configuration is modified, contractual service obligations can be unknowingly breached. This could happen, for example, when a user is updating an SLA but makes the wrong change, or is trying to add a new SLA that conflicts with an existing SLA. When this change happens in the background, SLAs will start to breach across the organization. 

By the time your IT department can track down what went wrong, the damage is already done and the trust between service providers and customers has begun to degrade. Depending on the severity and type of the breaches, your organization could be liable and noncompliant. If this happens internally and your own employees are not getting responses in a timely manner, that’s one thing. It’s another thing if you have violated the terms of service for your most strategic customer. 

As your organization scales, SLAs tend to proliferate as more and more teams are relying on service desks and more services are being supported. For an admin, this means increased complexity, and, when something goes wrong, it is more challenging to identify which SLA configuration change is the culprit. 

Managing your SLAs with advanced auditing

With advanced auditing capabilities in Jira Service Management Data Center, admins can access a comprehensive audit log that records changes in the instance based on the selected coverage level. In this case, you might suspect that an SLA has been mistakenly changed. To verify that an SLA was changed, you can search the audit log, reviewing SLA-related events to identify the source of the problem. The audit log will show not just which SLA component was changed but also who made the change and when. This information is critical when it comes to remedying the SLA misconfiguration as settings will need to be undone and certain SLAs recalculated. 

Once you’ve found the offending SLA in the audit log, the fix is straight forward: you can modify the SLA in question or delete it and create a new one by navigating to “SLAs” under project settings. Learn more about setting up SLAs in Jira Service Management here. 

By regularly checking the audit log for changes to SLA configurations, you can manage SLAs and ensure compliance with internal and external regulations. 

Scanning your audit logs daily or weekly is time-consuming and unsustainable as your organization grows. By leveraging advanced auditing’s file externalization, you can integrate your third-party monitoring tools, such as SumoLogic or CloudWatch. With your monitoring tools, you can set up real-time trigger notifications to alert you when critical changes are made in your instance. You can then quickly resolve any unapproved SLA changes and ensure compliance with internal and external regulations. The advantage of this approach is that once it is set up, you can rest easy knowing that if something does go wrong, you’re looped in immediately and can solve the problem quickly as opposed to relying on a team member or customer noticing some glitchy SLAs calculations - which can sometimes take weeks to detect. 

Learn more about advanced auditing in Jira Service Management Data Center here.

Apps and extensibility

IT has always played an important role within any organization, but that role has shifted from focusing primarily on team productivity to now being part of the organization’s overall business strategy. This shift in focus is based on ITIL v4 best practices, which include things such as:

• Collaboration
• Increased visibility
• Optimization and automation

To truly apply ITIL practices, you need to adopt IT service management (ITSM) and for most organizations, that’s Jira Service Desk. However, maintaining visibility and building automation into your IT workflows can become more challenging at scale.

One area that can be particularly challenging at scale is asset management. Here’s an example of how you can extend Jira Service Desk by integrating an asset management app.

Improving knowledge discoverability for ITSM

When done right, creating a proactive, self-service knowledge base can dramatically lower the number of issues in your support queue and save IT teams hours of work. Not only does it help save agents from answering repetitive questions, but they empower them to focus their time on more complex challenges, creating long-term value rather than putting out fires.

While knowledge management provides myriad benefits, it is an ongoing responsibility that requires you to think about what happens with all of that content over time. Even after you’ve implemented a system, there’s a constant cycle of adding new material and eliminating items that are outdated or obsolete, and this especially the case for enterprise organizations.

When you have 10,000+ users or customers relying on your Confluence instance as a knowledge base, ensuring the discoverability and relevance of your content as you scale is paramount for Confluence to be effective.

Monitoring and reporting

Bitbucket is the Git management solution designed for professional development teams. Built to provide source code collaboration for teams of any size, across any distance, Bitbucket Data Center offers the safety and reliability you need to scale your operations globally.

Branching your way through any incident

In Bitbucket, developers use branches to easily collaborate in a central codebase. It also prevents changes that haven’t been fully vetted from impacting other developers. As an admin in Bitbucket, it’s your responsibility to establish the branch workflow and set up guardrails based on the type of branch your teams are working on (release, hotfix, production, etc.). This workflow also allows you to define the number of required reviewers before the branch can hit production. Setting these guardrails will enable you to ensure that the development team abides by the quality, security, and compliance requirements set by the business (or more importantly, the government ex. SOX compliance).

For example, if someone (another admin or someone who mistakenly has admin permissions) changes these specifications, the team can go from having multiple required reviewers to zero, allowing anyone to merge their own code and potentially cause significant damage to your application. There’s also the chance that someone sets too many reviewers, for less critical branch types, slowing down production and preventing a fix from going out. This can be caused by someone on the development team who requests a change to the list of required reviewers, and an admin on your team makes the change without fully understanding the implications of this change. Or if a development manager with project permissions makes this change on their own without informing the admin team. While the team is well-intentioned in both cases, the impact of this change can reverberate across your instance and allow improperly reviewed code to hit production and potentially impact your users.

Keeping your code protected and in compliance with advanced auditing

To ensure that your code stays protected and aligns with the organizational or program policies you have in place, advanced auditing allows you to track any changes that have been made to branch configurations and several other events. This offers a referenceable log that you can use as part of your risk management and compliance strategy. By monitoring these events, you can quickly identify when a change has been made to your configurations, go into the project permissions, correct the issue and return the settings to normal before it impacts your users. Because once it causes an interruption to service or a poor user experience, it can peel away the trust users have in your product.

If you have concerns that the root cause of these issues stems from inaccurate permissions, you can go into your user management controls and ensure that only the appropriate users have project-level permissions. If someone is abusing their permissions, you can remove their access or adjust their permissions to that of a regular Bitbucket user. In either scenario, this may also signal that it’s time for your team to review (or create) user management policies that specify the right level of permissions for every user and role within the team. Too often, we see outdated user groups or ad hoc policies based on when the instance was first deployed that no longer meets the demands of an enterprise solution. To learn more about user management, check out our security and compliance handbook.

Apps and extensibility

Scale, automate, and extend Bitbucket to build better software faster

Building a DevOps strategy that ensures your teams have the tools they need to be successful is critical to delivering on your business objectives. As consumer expectations and competition continues to be at an all-time high, finding ways to deliver faster and without compromising quality, has become a top priority for most organizations.

Unfortunately, there’s not a one size fits all of implementation of DevOps. Every team has to build the toolchain that best meets the needs of their organization. And for many large enterprise teams, that choice includes Bitbucket Data Center. However, Bitbucket is only one part of a successful DevOps strategy. In fact, there are multiple products that need to work together to deliver on the promise of DevOps, but finding the right ones that can support your teams at scale can be challenging.

So we suggest starting with one of the most critical elements on your DevOps strategy, your CI/CD pipeline.

Creating a repeatable reliable process

Most organizational processes start small and with a manual checklist. Prior to an organization scaling, there’s often one person or a small team who was responsible for compiling and building your code. If you needed a build, you could walk over to their desks and immediately kick off that process.

As time goes on and your organization grows, that process becomes unsustainable. That small team has become its own department and while they use to share an office with you, they’re now all over the world and managing several code bases across the organization. The only way to ensure that the code Tim developed in Sydney has been through the same quality review as Gaby’s in New York is by converting manual reviews to automated ones.

Automation is a key value of CI/CD. Once automated, tedious, and repetitive tasks, like filing a bug report or rerunning a build, can be performed quickly and on-demand. Making a process that was once prone to human error and inconsistencies, more productive and sustainable for the development team.

Improving productivity using automation

To automate your builds in Bitbucket, you can use Webhook to Jenkins for Bitbucket. Jenkins is one of the leading CI tools on the market and with Bitbucket Data Center, teams have the freedom to integrate with the best tools in the industry.

With this integration, schedule when and how your builds are started. By configuring your hook to a repository or project, you can set-up triggers that will kick-off a build automatically, and can be customized based on the needs of your team.

You can also set requirements that won’t start a build if something specific is in the commit message. For any of us who have ever looked in a repository message log, we know that it can be a bit of a mess, so work with your development teams to implement commit message guidelines and include guidance on what messages aren’t going to start a build.

Additionally, this integration allows you to trigger builds manually and get visibility into the status of builds without ever leaving your Bitbucket instance.

These automated workflows make it easier than ever for teams to increase velocity and address some of the friction and interruptions to work that is caused by constantly switching between products.

Apps and extensibility

Regardless of which Atlassian products your organization uses, managing the users of those products is a critical consideration. A solid strategy for user management helps you keep your products secure and save money on license consumption. And with the right solution, you can avoid getting bogged down in any manual tasks and instead focus on creating value for your end-users and the organization as a whole.

What’s more, the challenges of managing users are only compounded as you scale. Extensibility is key for seamless enterprise user management. Integrating with your existing remote user directory allows you to save time, improve scalability and ultimately streamline user management. Crowd makes these integrations easy and our Data Center edition offers additional features to help you make the most of them. That way, you can save time, headaches, and money.

Improving user management at scale

Managing users from a central location is key for scalability and convenience. And to leverage that kind of centralization, you need to be able to integrate your existing user directories with your Atlassian tools.

But if you have more than one Atlassian product - or for that matter, another instance of the same product - then you have to integrate your directory with all of those products. This solution isn’t scalable; it forces you to spend time on administrative tasks and it means that your users have to configure their account in multiple products. With Crowd, you can centralize your user management in one place with a single remote directory integration. This saves you time and provides a user management solution that will scale with you. And whether you’re using one of the popular LDAP directory servers, a custom solution, or even more than one user directory, Crowd makes integrating easy.

Once you’ve integrated your user directory (or directories) with Crowd, managing access for those users is another hurdle. At the enterprise level, it’s often unnecessary - and undesirable - to grant all of your users access to all of the products you own. In fact, the additional license consumption that this causes can be costly for your organization. One simple way to address this problem is to create groups that define access to particular products. For example, you could have a “jira-users” group for only the people that need access to Jira. However, if you don’t have access to the remote directory, this could be impossible or - at the very least - extremely inefficient. Crowd helps you get around that problem with local groups; you can create groups and manage their permissions all within Crowd. That way, you can save the time involved in reaching out to external teams and the money spent on unnecessary licenses.

Making the most of your Azure AD integration in Crowd Data Center

While Crowd offers built-in connectors for many popular LDAP directory servers, we’ve noticed that more and more of our customers are integrating Crowd with Microsoft Azure AD. In fact, a 2019 analysis from Microsoft showed a 100% year-over-year increase in applications integrated with Azure AD.

To help make these integrations as useful as possible, we’ve implemented a number of time-saving features in Crowd Data Center. Firstly, we’ve enabled local groups, so that managing users is as quick and simple in Azure AD as it is in connector directories like Microsoft AD. Secondly, we’ve created selective synchronization so that you can filter by group and selectively grant access during synchronization in order to speed up the process and cut down on unnecessary license consumption. Both features make managing users at scale more time and cost efficient.

When users are easily managed - individuals can be quickly added, groups created, and access granted - user management becomes a business advantage rather than a drain on resources. With Crowd Data Center’s advanced features to help you make the most of your Azure AD integration, you can achieve great user management at scale.