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Overview
Connect GitHub, Linear or Jira and Overdesk works with your engineering team's tracker in two ways. The tracker's issues join your knowledge base, so a draft can tell a customer whether a bug is known and whether it was fixed. And when a conversation turns up a new problem, your support team can turn it into an issue from Overdesk, after reading and confirming it.
What a tracker adds
- Knowledge: each night Overdesk syncs the issues of the repositories, teams or projects you list, and for GitHub the published releases too. See GitHub, Linear and Jira.
- Issues from a conversation: a person on your team starts an issue with a suggested title and description, edits it and confirms. See Creating issues from a conversation.
Writing is a separate permission
Opening an issue is the one thing Overdesk writes to any of these trackers. It never creates one on its own, since a person confirms every issue, and it never edits, closes or comments on an issue that already exists.
How writing is allowed differs by tracker, because the trackers themselves differ:
| GitHub | Linear | Jira | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You connect with | A fine-grained token and a list of repositories | A personal API key and a list of team keys | Your Jira site, account email, an API token and a list of project keys |
| Your team can open issues when | The token's Issues permission is read and write | The key has full access rather than Read | The box Let my team open Jira issues from a conversation was ticked when you connected |
| With the read-only setup | Issue opening stays off | Issue opening stays off | Issue opening stays off until the box is ticked |
GitHub and Linear both issue read-only credentials, so the credential you choose is the switch. Atlassian has no read-only API token, so Jira gets an explicit opt-in on its connect form, off unless you tick it.
Only where an admin approved
Issues can be opened only in the repositories, teams or projects listed on that tracker's page in Integrations. The same list decides what Overdesk reads, so removing an entry stops both at once: its issues leave the knowledge base, and your team can no longer open issues there.
Who does what
- Admins and the owner connect trackers and choose the repositories, teams or projects.
- Agents, admins and the owner can open issues from a conversation. Viewers do not see the option. See Roles and permissions.
- Only a person signed in to Overdesk can open an issue. No scheduled job, webhook or automation does.
Limits
Each connection reads up to 20 repositories, teams or projects, and each one counts as a knowledge source toward your plan's limit. See Plans and pricing.