Ticket duplication has ramped significantly at my workplace since my earlier comments (27-28 Oct 2022).  I'm spending a crazy amount of time linking tickets together.  I like the ticket linking function, but the inability to merge duplicate tickets means more time searching for a ticket when unmerged duplicates of it exist.  This has pinched me and my manager several times since my earlier comments.

We'll be migrating to another ticketing system this year.  Like all other ticketing systems that I've used in the last decade, it isn't nearly as robust as Jira Service Management, but at least it has ticket merging!

Would love to have this feature. We used this daily in our old ticketing system. We have tickets coming in from our monitoring tool and these tickets are the same issue that are cleared, but then triggered again. These issues really need to be merged into 1 ticket versus being linked, leaving each individual ticket left in the queue view. It makes the queue very cluttered where a merged ticket would just leave the parent ticket.
Another issue I have, is that I have closure criteria set on incidents that make it a little more difficult to close out the linked tickets via automation. These linked tickets aren't worked individually, but we want to keep track of them.

+1

Still waiting

I recommended adding a build in free feature to merge tickets

We started using AD auth in March, after having Jira accts with 2FA and we are still cleaning up the fall out. This was a gut punch to our customer adoption with our most tenured users feeling less confident in our service levels.

Still amazed that this isn't yet implemented.

+1

Hi,

As for many commenting above, this feature is a MUST for us if we want to build any kind of automation integrations.

Data management should be flexible. Linking issues is doing nothing to the Roadmap and Dashboards. Duplicated tickets mess up things. 

Man, once I saw the usefulness and ease of merge in other, better, tools I am astonished its not higher on the road-map.

We'd love to see the option to merge multiple of the same related tickets into one. 

We migrated from Zendesk to JSM. Can't wait for JSM to have same merging feature as in ZD. 

Thanks!

I'd like to add my $0.02 on this issue that linking is just not a sufficient functionality for ticketing.  It's not super uncommon to have multiple alerting systems fire alerts for the same thing, or having a major company incident where 10 people put in tickets for the same thing at the same time.  In both of those use cases, linking doesn't really make sense because they are true duplicates and need to be merged.  A merge feature that allowed consolidation of them would serve to both reduce clutter and have all the relevant information on a single issue in one place instead of scattered across 10 "linked" tickets.

@isalawudeen
Our Issue Merger for Jira is free: https://bit.ly/IssueMerger_C. We also have a version with more advanced features called Issue Merger PRO for Jira: https://bit.ly/IssueMergerPro_C. It's free for up to 10 users.

Can you suggest issue merge add-ons for cloud that are free ?

You can build a good solution with issue links and automation, alternatively there are also some issue merge add-ons, for cloud there are also free ones.

Our team is already discussing a move away from Jira SD because the merge function is still in the 'Future Consideration' stage, whilst this post goes back to 2017..!

The LINK functionality is a feature that is rarely used and rarely useful to my team.

yes @brage 

they fired 500 people

Any update?

When we migrated to JSM from FreshDesk (a simple helpdesk tool for half the price) we were shocked not to be able to merge tickets. I mean, if you have any experience in dealing with customers sending over emails, they can produce multiple threads or even create independently 5 tickets for the same problem. 

If you are able to link tickets in a parent/child construct, where you can simply update the parent and all the child tickets take on the progress and any customer commentary is fed back through, that would achieve a similar result to merging tickets.  But all the comments are correct, it is unacceptable for a service management tool not to acknowledge and deal with multiple customers logging a ticket on a single incident.

This definitely a must-have feature for any ticketing system.

Link doesn't serve as a replacement for Merge. Having this functionality is vital I(not only)MHO.

Please add this feature.  It would save us time.

Please implement this feature. This is basic native functionality on competing ticketing systems like Zendesk or Service Desk. It should not require a paid addon to be implemented

So many duplicates in our servicedesk because merge functionality is not present. Linking tickets are only finefine if they are a related but separate issue . Several tickets can be created within the same issue with users sending in e-mails from different e-mail addresses or another person who is cc'd in or not in the previous e-mail contributes. Please prioritise this feature... you will see this functionality used much more than your link-issue feature.

Our team could use this feature especially between a software project and a work tracking project.

Couldn't agree more David. 

This morning I thought oh excellent, I have two tickets that need to be merged. As per what others are saying, this is core functionality your competitors have in place. Being fit for market is one thing (ticket merging) then continue to innovate on the other things you are building. 

From a customer who is and missing ticket merging. 

Agreed.  Most competing products have had a ticket-merge function for years.  For Jira Service Management Cloud to be such an excellent ticketing system but lack that function in 2022 is just... wrong.

I've tried the Issue Merger PRO for Jira, which is a great tool but doesn't fix our problem. Because Jira doesn't have a merge function, it closes the duplicate ticket and uses automation to sync the comments. A good workaround but it isn't a true merge functionality.

Even the most basic servicedesk management systems are equipped with this functionality so I was really disapointed to see that Jira doesn't have this much needed function!

After seeing the comment from @Brandon Lee below, I searched the Atlassian Marketplace and found the following:

• Issue Merger for Jira
• Issue Merger PRO for Jira (which I presume is the product that Brandon mentioned)
• Merge Agent for Jira

(I see that the User mention tool isn't functioning as expected... )

This is a fundamental requirement for ticket management, was very disappointed to see this was not in the product, and more so that it's not on the roadmap.

Hey Jehan!

I really appreciate the regular updates on the thread but I think that things like this need focus and to be treated as 'core functionality' and prioritized. There is no mention of this feature being worked on in the Cloud Roadmap even in 2023/24. It doesn't need any further explanation around why it's not a viable workaround.

If it's a basic feature that your competitors have out of the box and is an expected function by the user... This should be core functionality. If it's an enhancement that isn't considered a basic requirement, yeah let someone offer a service on the Marketplace.

Currently the marketplace is full of addons that provide BASIC functionality that is just lacking in the JSM product. So Atlassian are making money off the initial purchased licence fee per user + 15-20% for the addons per user. The marketplace addons are literally making billions of revenue for Atlassian

It makes me doubtful that Atlassian will ever focus on making the core functionality for areas like this any good, because why would you? You'd be cutting off a revenue stream and you already have your developers working on shiny new things to tempt in new customers or offer different charged services.

I want Atlassian to prove me wrong. I really do.

Tabisem Bashir,

I use the app, Issue Merge Pro, and it works great. Give it a try. There is a little work to setup but can be customized in a flow. they give ok support as well if need. 

you have not really listened to the customers who are trying to explain to you that linking is not solution it still creates more work. We require merge of tickets and if this is not availble then we will not be using Jira servicedesk cloud. Do we really want suppliers who do not listen ?

Hi all,

Sorry for the delays here, we are not able to prioritise this feature at this point in time but will be reviewing this in the coming months. 

Apologies that we are not able to get onto this sooner, it is a very important feature. 

Best regards,

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Product Manager, Jira Service Management

+1 here

The flaw with your recommendation for linking as a solution to ticket merge is that linking does not merge the email and comment communications from all the tickets into one view.

If I link the ticket as a child issue of the main ticket I am working on and then resolve it; then when the user(s) I am working with reply to an email notification for that child case, the reply will not show in the main case but in the child one.

Sure, I will receive a notification of the case re-opening, and I can go to that separate case and review what the customer said, then go back to the main case and reply to them from there and record any notes I have then continue working from that main case. However, this has several major weaknesses, including wasting technician time with extra workflow and communication friction, fragmenting the communication stream across multiple tickets, reducing the usefulness of ticket search as an internal knowledge base, and degrading the ability to track load and status across the system.

I hope you will change your mind and get this feature added. I can see several possible ways to design it that would allow you to improve or add other features in the process of implementing this and I'd be happy to discuss them with your team if it would help.

Regards,

Jason

In the least, Can a ticket be "child"ed and removed from the common queue? just relating it leaves things a disaster. 

This is a standard feature, it's embarrassing that Jira doesn't have it.

@Damien Michaudet, we've recently been trialing HaloITSM and FreshService. Both terrific for our needs and have all the 'default' functionality that is standard across ITSM products that Jira considers irrelevant

@Nikolay Rayanov, please give links !

@David Wadgan, same here. There are now better, faster, more useful, and better-looking cheaper products out there.

We are having serious discussions within my organisation about ditching Jira. It's not a decision we take lightly given how integral it is to how multiple departments operate, but we're rapidly losing faith in Atlassian's ability or willingness to support the requirements that drew us to their products in the first place. Everything requires a marketplace add-on, and they're almost never free. Either we double the cost of the product using these add-ons to perform basic tasks, or we build our own solutions with the API or ScriptRunner.

Not having the features we need is annoying, but watching new, completely unnecessary features pour in while this request remains unfulfilled, is a slap in the face.

/sarcasm

Maybe your linked issues and tickets lead to the fatal outtake lately, or as the ceo said: "bad internal communications". 

/endsarcasm

Being "company without bullshit" also means, listen to customers as long as they are customers, willing to pay and use the products. 

There are (paid) 3rd Party tools doing this simple task - so it feels like being slapped in the face when your PM says: we're not considering giving you a basic feature that is spread widely among other solutions that are free or open source by the way.

Going to unfollow now, dont have time to read other frustrated comments - need to find and delete a few dozen duplicates caused by false-positive errors issued by our antivirus now. Luckily we have a montly plan.

+1

Completely agree with all of the other comments here. We're heavily invested in Atlassian products, but this is another example of how you appear to not listen to requests from your paying customers and is one of the reasons we're considering other Helpdesk solutions. To be clear, linking tickets is in no way an acceptable alternative.

Hi.  Service manager here for decades, much longer than Atlassian has been in business.  

> We aren't considering this at this point in time as we currently support linking tickets as the recommended solution.

This.  Is.  Not.  Ok.  I get where you're coming from, but respectfully, we need the ability to merge tickets.  "Just link them together" is not the same, and is not an acceptable alternative (and is definitely not as billed a "workaround" or "solution" because it doesn't do the same thing).  

This would be really needed feature for us. I would give it 100 votes if I could, but I don't so I give just one  

+1 for me and my team too.

+1 for me and my team too. 

Currently, this is the 11th most voted on issue in the JSDCLOUD project (but since three of them are already closed, it's higher). How can an issue this popular, fundamental, and old (more than five years from the raised date) still be not actively implemented?

Thank you, @Jehan, for being our advocate! Several of our users raise and re-raise tickets and jumping between "duplicates" and "is duplicated by" slows down our team and makes it hard to quickly get a ticket's jist, so I'm glad to hear someone is fighting for us.

From reviewing the Implementation of New Features Policy – what else can those that need this feature do? We've "vote[d], watch[ed], and comment[ed]", we've "describe[d our] use-case... and how the suggested change would benefit [us]", and we've "join[ed] the conversation".

I agree that this is a core requirement for any type of service management ticketing system. Due to the way Jira sends out notifications, if people respond to a case other than the original author, a new case will open. Not addressing this seems like a big miss.

This is a core feature to a supportdesk. I would kindly ask this be prioritized OR look at how responses are coming in to tickets to better ensure responses are grouped properly so merging isn't needed.

This should be top of the priority list.

Hi all, 

I'm very sorry for the delays in the updates here. We do not currently have immediately plans to work on this but we do recognise it is needed. I'm working to prioritise this feature and will provide updates in the coming months. 

Once again, I entirely understand the frustration and will do my best to see if this can be progressed. 

I'll be in touch, 

Jehan Gonsalkorale

Product Manager, Jira Service Management

Adding an upvote for this despite the March update.

also... this hurts, because it's so damn true

"How can service desk software not have this basic feature?

Every basic feature (and bug) I look up has the same response - "gathering interest" for 5+ years with no one assigned, or "won't implement" with some appalling kludgy workaround.

I think I'm done with this product."

We just migrated to Jira for our service desk, our first case was a user creating a duplicate request. I was very surprised to see no way of merging requests. As others have said, it's a standard feature, and something that most, if not all teams would benefit from.

@Nick McLeod

Overall experience here ... I couldn't find better words. Perfect description for this product

How can service desk software not have this basic feature?

Every basic feature (and bug) I look up has the same response - "gathering interest" for 5+ years with no one assigned, or "won't implement" with some appalling kludgy workaround.

I think I'm done with this product.

Atlassian... customer...response... crickets. No updates ever.

Atlassian announced it is going to launch private spaces for ALL of our employees (which we do not want). So I guess a bunch of Atlassian Admins requested that feature and they decided to work on that first and force it down our throats.

Good grief! How can they be so out of touch of what features we actually need?

Now we are using Jira Service Management for a few months, we need the merge function more and more! Please introduce this functionality

We need this feature to start using helpdesk because we have this functionality in current solution and is very helpfull.

We also need this feature. 

Due to AWS going down for much of the day yesterday, my organization did not immediately receive the e-mails that were sent by our customer to Jira.  As a result, the customer's ticket never generated before he continued to send e-mails about his outage issue.  5 tickets were created as part of his e-mail chain.  He at least was smart enough to start including our direct e-mails in his replies so we eventually became aware of the issue.  Since he never received an initial response from Jira, none of his following responses had anything to direct his comments into, hence 5 tickets instead of 1.  Being able to merge these together makes much more sense than simply linking them as duplicates.  They weren't duplicate issues, they were one issue impacted by an outage that in turn affected Jira as well.  Please introduce this needed functionality.

100% agree. Atlassian, please finally start adding essentials core functions to your product which are available on other platforms. Please stop referring to some third party addons from your marketplace. We are in an corporation environment and not on a cellphone arcade. 

This is seriously needed, as others have pointed out, every other service desk system has merges, even the really bad systems. Merges are essential and can't be done by a third party addon because the comments need to be rearranged with correct time stamps etc, so native is required. This is such a basic requirement for a service desk system it is embarrassing that Jira has not implemented this yet.

Hi,

If anyone from the Atlassian product team is still watching this thread... I just want to point out that linking tickets together is not actually a workable workaround as it doesn't lessen any administrative effort from the agents. At best they'll still manually need to link everything together and change the issue types of duplicates to prevent duplicate SLAs. Looking at it I don't think you can do any JQL in the SLA to say don't run on tickets that have the 'is duplicated by' relationship.

There is a very common scenario in where third parties communicate with JSM, they WILL NOT include the key-id resulting in new tickets being created. There is then one source ticket followed by however many third party communications, all with differing SLAs which can pretty much invalidate your SLA reporting.

This is a relatively basic feature in most other ITSM systems. It's depressing that at this point the user community has to beg Atlassian product owners / devs to implement things that should exist OOB.

Having moved from vTiger this is the only functionality that we used that Jira Service Desk is missing.

Whilst not an everyday occurrence it was used most months

Merging IS available via an add-on called "Merge Agent for Jira"

We have added this and while it's not perfect, it works functionally well and serves its purpose

You can merge single or multiple source tickets into the one target ticket, append/replace selected fields, transition the existing tickets and set all future replies and comments to be merged into the target ticket also

I totally agree as well – replies from different addresses that are not in the list are very common for us.

Merging tickets should be available, obviously. Linking tickets as JSM does now, does not solve the problems help desks experience.

Of course if you were to vastly improve the linking functionality to an intuitive way to link tickets/issues and update them at once then linking would be the way to go (and yes, at that point you could decide to call it 'merging' in stead of just 'linking').

Merging tickets is a baseline standard in any ticketing system. Surprised to learn Jira does not have the functionality. This would be welcomed and almost expected in my IT environment.

Standard in any other ticket tool and would be great in Jira as well

Please enable users to merge tickets in an intuitive way. Thank you.

Agree that merge/grouping similar tickets is a key functionality that would be welcomed by the DevOps team and Service agents.

Would be great future to have, lets hope it won't take too long for this..

Inserts meme of kid not so patiently waiting.

Not sure who at Atlassian is making the call that linking is a better option. Merging is basic and crucial functionality of just about every other ticketing system, linking appears to be only useful for relating issues of different incident types. Linking issues does not resolve double handling of each related ticket, nor does it reduce the size of the queue from say 200 to 100 due to cc's, replies and fwd's from other users. 

This is very basic and crucial functionality.

Hey, just wanted to say the world is still waiting...

I'm starting to think you can't make it. I hope you will prove me wrong soon and finally develop this functionality.

Atlasisan, how many votes till we actually start developing this feature?

It gets hard explaining to stakeholders on why a feature like this is not native to Jira but is available on other inferior products.

I will note that since my first post on here we have started testing Merge Agent for Jira and are happy with it so far. Still, this should be an integrated part of Jira and not cost the customer more.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1219514/merge-agent-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

We need this feature added. Other ticketing systems I have worked with give you the option to Merge tickets. It is crucial  specially when there are tickets regarding the same issue.

Unbelievable that this corefeature isnt implemented..
while seaching for a solution, i found this issue in postings back in 2017! 

The reason I am supporting this request is simple. If I have 12 tickets opened (for whatever reason) about the same thing I have to link them all. If people are commenting on these 12 tickets, that is 12 tickets I have to bounce around in to get all the info being provided or to answer all the comments. If we could merge these 12 then I would have one place where everything is. Here is what I want to see; I am sure it has all been stated before:

• Select Multiple Ticket >
• Merge those selected to a Main ticket > 
• Upon merge:
  • All ticket descriptions get added as comments of the new sole ticket.
  • All ticket reporters get added as Request participants of the new sole ticket.
  • All notifications going forward are based solely on the now sole ticket, its assignees, its Request participants and any Reporter configured.
• All tickets that were merged into the now sole ticket are marked as merged and closed.
  • if these tickets are viewed individually  again, no more comments or changes are submittable.
  • possible rerouting to the new merged ticket when clicking on the any merged tickets.
• Every one using Jira is happy about being able to merge; those that are unhappy get sent a donut. 

is atlassian ignore this functionality to protect and keep the payable addon alive? otherwise it isn't making any sense why we are facing such a ignorant attitude from atlassian. almost every time i'm facing this types of issue which a core feature is missing and there is payable add-on available for it. that is nice strategy yea....

Please make this happen!

This is the one feature that Jira is missing. Like our SOC keeps debating on switching to a different ticketing system for this one missing feature. Yes we can pay for a Jira app in the marketplace, but we already pay enough for the Jira as is. Like my boggles my mind why this hasn't already been developed, it makes no sense.

LINKING tickets is the stupidest thing.

Please add support for this soon.

Linking the tickets won't help at all. This is a very fundamental support ticket feature, I don't understand why it's put on future development without any ETA.

Great feature everybody needs, please add soon, thanks.

Reminds me of 6999. Atlassian just don't give a sh1t about it's customers. Great. 

This is a desperately needed feature. I currently have 11 tickets open (and counting) for a single issue because people are responding from different email addresses. It's incredibly difficult to keep track of. Merging is a basic function that should have been added years ago.

A spam email gets through to 25 people. 25 people report it. I now have 25 tickets. No way to simply put them all into one ticket and answer it?

This type of scenario occurs often. This is a necessary feature of any service tracking software. Please add a merge function.

Another key feature which isn't included in Jira. The more I'm using this system, the more disappointed  I'm getting. Please sort it out!

Me and my fellow co-workers are have repeatedly missed the issue merging function. Please add. Thank you.

+1 this functionality should be included. Ticket tracking, accurate statistics and closure are all affected by the lack of being able to merge related tickets 

This is still a mess. As is Identity and security without paying for add-ons. I agree that Fresh Service handles this way better. They also respond to customers in their forums.

Bam!!!

When using an e-mail feed into JSM, duplicates often occur when a manager responds to authorise a request and the ticket system fails to see the resemblance between the two. If you don't improve your heuristics, can you at least allow me to clean up the mess the lack of heuristics causes with a merge?

This may be one reason why my company may have to go with fresh desk, we get several duplicate issue tickets from customers and they need to be merged.

+1