Jira Alerts and Automations from Google Sheets for a Smooth Customer Experience

Google Sheets has emerged as an indispensable tool for modern teams, revolutionizing how tasks are managed, data is analyzed, and collaborations unfold within organizations. Its pivotal role stems from its versatility, offering a dynamic platform that enables seamless data organization, real-time collaboration, and powerful automation.

‍

As a cloud-based spreadsheet software, Google Sheets empowers IT operations teams to streamline workflows, make data-driven decisions, and foster enhanced team collaboration irrespective of geographical boundaries. Its accessibility, intuitive interface, and integration capabilities with other Google Workspace tools make it invaluable for optimizing operational efficiency, fostering transparency, and facilitating agile decision-making processes within today's dynamic and fast-paced business environments.

‍

Benefits of Using Google Sheets for IT Operations

1. Collaborative Roadmap Creation: Google Sheets allows multiple team members to collaborate in real time on a product roadmap. Different stakeholders, including product managers, developers, designers, and marketing teams, can contribute their insights and updates simultaneously, ensuring everyone is aligned.
2. Templates and Automation: Google Sheets offers templates and the ability to automate tasks using scripts and add-ons. This saves time by providing predefined formats for common tasks and automating repetitive processes.
3. Iterative Planning and Alignment: Product development is iterative, and roadmaps need to evolve. Google Sheets' collaborative nature facilitates ongoing updates, adjustments, and refinements to the roadmap, ensuring alignment as the product progresses through different stages.

‍

Why using GSheets as a stand-alone product isn’t a great idea for Product Teams?

1. Complexity for Large Datasets: Handling large datasets in Google Sheets can be challenging. It is difficult to go through rows and rows of data manually to find critical information.
2. Overlooking Critical Tasks: Relying solely on Google Sheets for managing IT Operations can inadvertently lead teams to overlook critical activities. With a more automated system in place, stakeholder needs can be promptly addressed.  
3. Lack of Automation: IT Operations often involve repetitive tasks, monitoring, and automated processes. Google Sheets, on its own, lacks native features for advanced automation and alerting.

‍

Benefits of Alerting and Automation

1. Real-Time Response and Issue Resolution: Alerting and automation systems enable businesses to promptly identify and address issues as they arise, by setting up alerts for specific triggers or thresholds in data.
2. Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity: Automation streamlines repetitive tasks and workflows, and ensures that teams spend little to no time identifying problems and frees up time for more strategic tasks.
3. Improved Decision-Making and Insights: Alerting and automation systems facilitate data-driven decision-making by providing timely and accurate information. By leveraging automated data collection, analysis, and reporting, business teams gain access to real-time insights and trends.

‍

Use Cases where IT Operations teams need to be alerted from GSheets

1. Monitoring Thresholds and Incidents: Google Sheets is used to store and manage monitoring thresholds or incident logs. When certain thresholds are breached or specific incidents occur (such as server downtime, high CPU usage, or network latency),
2. Change Management Notifications: For change management processes, Google Sheets can be used to track planned changes, approvals, or schedules. A change in status can trigger alerts to be sent to the IT operations
3. Health Score Monitoring: When customer health scores go below a certain threshold potentially indicating low usage or an eventual churn, the customer success team can get notified via a ticket on Freshdesk to investigate the reasons for this.

‍

How does Locale.ai help?

Locale is an operations automation and issue-tracking solution, and mainly provides the following benefits to business operations teams:

1. Automating ticket creation: Support tickets on Freshdesk can be automatically created when a few rows on Google Sheets match the trigger filters that have been set up to alert CX teams.

2. Collaboration between different functions: Notifications through Locale can be sent out to multiple teams and stakeholders, and provide a one-stop shop for all information to be recorded and monitored.
3. Escalations and Auto-resolution: Locale automatically escalates tickets that have been open for a long time to their respective stakeholders, and also auto-resolves incidents that do not match the trigger conditions any longer.

‍

How to set up an alert on Locale.ai?

Step 1: Connect a Google Sheet

Connecting to Google Sheets is a quick 5-minute integration where we add a link to the Google Sheet, and choose which worksheet needs to be added as the data source on Locale, and voila! We are ready to set up alerts :)

Locale can also integrate with your database or data warehouse to send out alerts! Find out more here!

‍

Step 2: Set up Alert Configurations

In this step, we set rules to monitor the data. This starts with a SQL query or adding filters. Once you do this, you’ll be able to receive the results of the query or filter at a set frequency.  

Playbooks can be set to ensure faster resolution, and automatic resolution can be enabled to ensure incidents on Locale are resolved with zero manual intervention, once they move out of the queue on your data source!

Dynamic stakeholder assignments are possible for larger teams. Incidents can be configured to have labels, escalations, and playbooks to ensure adherence.

‍

Step 3: Notify teams via Jira

Connect with JIRA to ensure that your team receives any critical information as support tickets that they can work on. Group your notifications to ensure end users don’t get spammed and yet receive all the incidents that they need to prioritize and work on.

‍

You’re good to go! Once the alert is set, incidents will start flowing in when there are new rows identified in your datasource!

‍

Learn more on how to automate ticket creation with JIRA: How to Automate Ticket Creation on Jira with Locale

‍

Conclusion

While Google Sheets, as a standalone product exhibits limitations, its integration with a robust alerting tool like Locale significantly enhances its utility for teams in optimizing business operations. Locale's alerting capabilities complement Google Sheets by providing real-time notifications, data monitoring, and automated alerts, empowering teams to mitigate errors promptly, streamline workflows, and ultimately improve overall business operations efficiency. Together, this integration harnesses the collaborative and data management strengths of Google Sheets while addressing its limitations, creating a more efficient and responsive environment for teams to thrive.

‍

Excited to get started? It takes less than 10 minutes to get all things set up: Try for free