Atlassian Corp. Plc. today introduced an array of new features for Opsgenie and Confluence, two tools at the heart of its product lineup, in a bid to help users collaborate more effectively with one another.

Opsgenie, the first offering the company has updated, is also one of the newest additions to its portfolio. It’s an incident response platform aimed at information technology teams that Atlassian acquired for $295 million last September. Administrators rely on Opsgenie to alert them about technical issues such as application outages, as well as to manage details such as which member of the team should handle what problem.

Today’s update adds automation capabilities to streamline the incident response workflow. Opsgenie can now keep an eye on the cloud services on which an organization relies and notify administrators if one experiences an outage. The platform can also take corrective action on its own in certain situations, thanks to a new tool that lets IT teams create predefined workflows to handle common issues automatically.

Opsgenie competes in a crowded market against products from providers such as Splunk Inc. and PagerDuty Inc., which filed to go public last month. PagerDuty offers a similar tool for creating automation workflows.

One way Atlassian hopes to set Opsgenie apart is by integrating the platform with its other products, which are widely used by IT professionals. Today’s update adds a connector for Jira Software, the company’s industry-leading project management tool, that allows administrators to automatically create a to-do item in their team’s workspace when a new technical problem is detected.

Integration with outside services is also a major theme in the new version of Confluence that Atlassian is rolling out. The service, which is the company’s version of Google Docs, now enables users to embed media assets quickly from file sharing platforms such as Dropbox and G Suite into documents. Workers can also add file previews of items in outside platforms using “smart links.”

Another new addition is a slash command that functions much like an autocomplete function, except it brings up images, data tables and other assets that can be embedded in a document. Another category of page element users can add to a document are Actions. These are inline to-do items likewise introduced with today’s update that allow managers to assign work directly inside a shared file. 

Photo: Atlassian