Create a Jenkins Support Channel

When creating a large Jenkins setup, it is often a good idea to consider have a team governing, documenting, and managing the tools a little. These teams almost always require a clear support channel, otherwise everything becomes tribal knowledge, and that is not going to scale well.

Signature of a large Jenkins setup means it has

Multiple workers with varying operating systems
Multiple integrations to systems for static analysis, artifact repositories and code-review platform triggers such as pull-requests and patch sets
Support for an advanced authorization role strategy or single sign on from other platforms
Support for multiple build-systems such as MSBuild, Maven, Gradle, Ant, Make and so forth

When a large number of teams with a similarly large number of software development stacks starts to use it. Then it becomes relevant with being able to support the systems by providing a clear and obvious support-channel.

A common channel for issue-management is JIRA, which ironically started as an ITSM-platform. And another common place to store documentation is whatever source-control platform you have available, such as GitHub Pages, Wikimedia or Confluence.

So i would like to show how to include custom-integration in the Jenkins header directly into those tools.

Starting point

A clean Jenkins
A clean JIRA with project administrator access
The Jenkins simple theme plugin, i have configured the material-styling in my own Jenkins below
This custom Jenkins JIRA Issue Collector Plugin, you’ll have to build it yourself to get an .hpi-file to upload

Configure JIRA Issue Collector

In JIRA, create a target project
Go to settings for the project
Go to Issue Collectors
Click + Add issue collector
Configure it as you may wish, make sure your select custom trigger-style
Submit the collector
Extract the link in the markup JIRA wants you to embed.

The collector-link will look something like this

https://YOUR-PROJECT.atlassian.net/s/aef99a9d9e96520927s6987-T/-p6br4e/b/5/a44af77267a987a660377e5c46e0fb64/_/download/batch/com.atlassian.jira.collector.plugin.jira-issue-collector-plugin:issuecollector/com.atlassian.jira.collector.plugin.jira-issue-collector-plugin:issuecollector.js?locale=en-US&collectorId=909eeccc

Configure Jenkins to embed collector and run some `JavaScript`

Go to Manage Jenkins
Go to System Configuration
Fill in Issue Collector URL: with the collector-link from the previous step.
Fill in the Theme Javascript part with an accessable location where you save this JavaScript. SonaType Nexus rawFiles-store works nicely for this purpose.
Get the following html
Put it into the system message
preview html should now put two buttons in the header
If you want you can include custom styling to the buttons in the simple theme css box. I used the following to achieve the looks below.

And voila! You have opened a support channel directly from your Jenkins header into your documentation and added support for adding JIRA issues directly into your JIRA project! Clicking the Report an issue! will open a JIRA Modal and allow your users to fill in a support issue as their own JIRA users.

Issue collectors can be customized to pre-populate fields quite extensively, read more on Atlassians own documentation.

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