1c96672eaa97 I would add that the reporter and all request participants from the source ticket be added as request participants on the target, unless they are already present, or if one is the reporter on the target ticket.  Coming from Spiceworks, the way they handle merging is similar, but they also merge comments in-line to the target ticket, which can be confusing if ticket comments are conversational, and overlap in time between the two tickets.

Internally, we were discussing this lately since somebody came with the idea that it might be possible via REST API. Which is not the case.
However, I wanted to share how we thought that it would be good:

1. Trigger: In context menü of to be merged issue click on "merge this issue into..." and select the target issue. (maybe with forced input of reason)
2. create a comment in target issue with date and time of source issue creation with hint to merge and original issue and the content of the description
3. move all comments from source to target issue
4. change description of source issue to "@person merged ticket XYZ-123 into XYZ-2342 because reason"
5. set source issue to done with resolution merged (this may be configurable or selectable but preselected in 1)
6. create issue link XYZ-123 merged into XYZ-2342

Replys to source isssue must automatically be rerouted to target issue.

Jira would need the internal possibility to create comments with different timestamp and on behalf of others (which also would be great for migration scenarios ^^) and to move comments from one issue to another. 

Many years later in a new company, I return to Jira Cloud, actively drive its use and again encounter this problem... So many years have passed and Atlassian still ignores it... Just great!

If Jira wants to be a serious competitor to other customer or user support platforms, they need to implement features such as these that exist in competitor's products. 

This ticket isn't even 10 years old yet. By Atlassian standards, we still have many years to wait.

But honestly, at this point, I have no one to blame but myself.

After the custom url ticket disaster, I don't know why I still expect them to do basic ticket requests.  

The number of duplicates we are getting is now growing and the team and our customers are complaining about it. 

This is a frustrating omission, especially given how often the email handler gets confused and creates duplicate tickets. Linking tickets and then having to update both (or all 3 or 4) is inefficient and it's confusing for the customer and the Helpdesk team.

I agree that issue merge is needed. If JSM is used as a main IT ticketing system, this needs to be added. It is a very basic function of a good ticketing system. 

+1 do add this feature.

This is such a basic feature for any service desk, I have customers who are getting frustrated that this is not a feature we can provide.

This could lead to us choosing another service desk provider as our customer base grows.

+1

How can Atlassian say JSM is a service desk when we are not even allowed to merge two tickets? What happens when a customer opens the same ticket for the same request 2 or 3 times? Are we just supposed to have links to every ticket? That is stupid!! Other true ticketing systems allow you to merge tickets. Come on Atlassian. Get your act together. 

Rachel Crossman, Could you give the community feedback when Atlassian decides to implement this feature?
The function to merge cases it essential, not only for situations when different users raise a ticket for the same issue.

It also helps to keep the queues clean when, for example, there is a communication with external partners with other ticket systems which cannot answer correctly. A native merges feature can ensure that the answer will be attached to the origin case.
You see on the votes that some of your customers are waiting for this and the add-ons in the marketplace do not give the features what we need.

Giving up hope & building your own plugin seems more worth than putting any trust in Atlassian on this. Unfollowing after years.

+1 please implement asap. This is a core functionality

Why is this still opened with 1k+ votes while https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-3592 is closed for a full year saying you'll never do that?
No comment here whatsoever about that.
Is there a real chance that you will do it for JSM while you refuse to do it for the simple Jira CORE? I'd be naive to believe you'll.

Another Great job Atlassian!

https://getsupport.atlassian.com/browse/PCS-275815

I don't understood why still missing....

The Atlassian service desk system is over decades of all the competitors.

Atlassian, please add this. It's available in Codebase, Sirportly, Zendesk and many others that are mentioned. It's basic functionality IMO. 

Joining the others, totally disappointed (but not surprised!!!) that Atlassian doesn't care for his highest voted requests and find "MUST BE AVAILABLE" features to be "in consideration".
Merging is available on every other platform we've been through.
Atlassian had us with the On Premise where everything we needed was, now that they have moved to Cloud only - its votes after votes for features that should be available on day 1 and that were there on server edition.
Very frustrating and as all the comments go the same way, pretty much inappropriate for such company.

We still think you should add this feature.  Your competitors have this feature.  We want to move to Zendesk for this and many other missing features and complexity that makes Jira too hard to use for service desk ticketing.

I asked a JSM support rep about whether they dogfood JSM, and, if so, what they use for merging tickets. No answer on that. Sounds to me like you're not dogfooding... if so, why not?

I also mentioned to him that it seemed like JSM was getting confused by things like the Re: that gets added to the subject in a reply, and resulting in duplicate tickets. He had no comment about that either.

Anyway, another customer vote for this being a pretty important feature, especially with how easy it seems to be for JSM to spawn duplicate or more tickets for a single incident.

just as the original poster stated:
 
We MUST have the ability to be able to merge issues. This is standard in all the leading service and support desk systems. Our customers (internal) all log in via single sign-on. However, half the users use an alias as their primary email and this means we get duplicate issues for 50% of requests as soon as the customer replies to a question. 
 
the fact that Jira has STILL not implemented this feature after YEARS is absurd! I will be forced to switch out of Jira just as quickly as I onboarded our team into it due to this one simple thing that changes the efficiency of ticket handling massively. Conversational case handling is always more effective than individual case handling. Cases should be merged per conversation so that each customer has its own thread of cases, or at the VERY LEAST include a function to merge one case with an existing one to create a thread! But Jira cannot support either one of these concepts.

When your support team has to handle every new case as a new individual case even though they are for the same customer, and they have no way to merge cases together into a thread, or simply display them 'by customer' in threads to begin with,  this leaves the agents with no continuity or connection from one case to the next. Highly inefficient and disorganized.
 
as Gareth Jones said: "Not having the ability to merge tickets is like not having the ability to reply to tickets. It's such basic functionality that I'm honestly gobsmacked that it isn't already a feature. It almost pains me to call it a 'feature'."

I would make a push for my team to keep using JSD if it had merging capabilities, completely takes JSD off as a competitor in ITSM products.

My IT staff would like me to change to a different platform because of this issue. 

Please prioritize this feature in support desk. It's extremely cumbersome using your linking solution. We should be able to merge tickets from the Queues dashboard.

Seriously?  just moved over from Spiceworks to Jira Service Desk.  Spiceworks was free and had merge YEARS ago.... now we pay for it and don't get merge?

This is the most common and needed function. Why so impossible to solve it. All of the ticketing system has a resolution for it.

Jira would definitely benefit from this feature.

Echoing some other comments here; I've seen many inferior features added recently (the right-hand side panel in Release Views to name one), yet this feature still doesn't exist.

I've even considered some of the limiting factors that might make this feature difficult to implement, but I can also think of solutions for every single one, why can't Atlassian?

I've subscribed to answers in this ticket at leat a year ago (I think 2) to be updated when Jira would finally accept to develop this basic feature that any free open source ticketing system has. Now all I have is comments from people discovering Jira is ignoring those complaints and focusing on features that I don't even care about. I think I'll reconsider working with Jira next time I'll have the occasion.
 

It's baffling that this isn't a core feature and that Atlassian continues to devalue merge functionality.  

This feature is desperately needed.

Not having the ability to merge tickets is like not having the ability to reply to tickets. It's such basic functionality that I'm honestly gobsmacked that it isn't already a feature. It almost pains me to call it a 'feature'.

How is this not a feature yet? Please prioritize this request, as it is standard procedure in EVERY ticket system!!

Please prioritize merging issues, this is standard in all support system...

We migrated to Jira from Freshservice and there merging tickets is super easy and retains all comments, etc.

Quite the letdown that something like this is not supported...

I understand linking with 'is duplicated by' for duplicates, but when the same customer creates multiple tickets discussing the same issue (but providing different information), merging is the only logical solution. We need to see all of their communications in the same place.

Just came over to Jira from ManageEngine. Where is the ticket merge functionality? I get multiple users inputting the same ticket - let's merge them!

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!

+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

+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".