In the sysadmin team, we're having discussions about ways we can use JIRA to track our regular work better.

Currently, a lot of our work is triggered by emails that spam the entire team - for instance, Nagios alerts and updates to Noctane issues from Contegix both go to the entire team.

This isn't a scalable way of tracking work; everybody assumes that someone else will respond to email; even if someone does respond, there's often no way for the rest of the team to know if someone has already looked at an email or not (we can usually tell if someone has decided to respond, but if someone has looked and decided no response is required, we can't tell that).

Remote Links would be very useful (I think) in helping us to adapt JIRA to better track our work. Every Nagios alert has a url; every Noctane issue has a URL. If we had a bot that could create a JIRA issue and link it back to the remote url, this would be a start. However, we want to make sure that updates to the noctane issue/nagios alert get added to the same issue.

The cleanest way I can think of managing this would be if we can use JQL to search for "issues that link to this remote url"; but that's not currently possible.

The second-cleanest way I can think of managing this is to put the url (or some unique subset of it, like the Noctane issue number) in a custom field. However, the requirement that this field would have to be displayed on the issue type's issue-create screen means that this custom field would get flashed in front of humans all the time. My experience with doing this is that users get confused by this and start asking "Why do I have to fill in this field?", so I'd prefer to avoid having to do that if at all possible.