Jira – ServiceNow Integration Guide

Jira and ServiceNow are among the top tools that enterprises use today. Companies use both systems to distribute tasks between teams and departments, manage their resources, and plan work.

However, if you are using both platforms without integration between them, you miss out on the opportunity to automate and simplify your workflows and processes. Furthermore, you risk creating silos and delays of critical issues resolutions.

Let’s dive in and see why it is so important to have both systems working seamlessly together and what you can achieve by integration between them. Furthermore, let’s see exactly how easy it is to set up the integration if you choose the right integration tool.

About Jira

Atlassian’s Jira is one of the most popular project management tools used by developers. It is really easy to work with and at the same time has powerful capabilities and agile functionality.

Jira Software helps teams plan, track, and release great work. It can be configured to fit any type of project. Teams can start with a pre-made template or create their own custom project. Jira issues, also known as tasks, track each piece of work that needs to pass through the workflow steps.

Permissions can be customized so admins determine who can see and perform which actions. It is easy to generate reports using the project information to track the progress and stages of each project.

Jira was initially designed as a bug and issue tracker. It has later evolved to the rich project management tool that it is today, supporting all kinds of use cases. Jira is highly flexible and allows configurations for diverse environments and processes. It supports all types of agile methodologies.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that helps enterprises improve the efficiency of their operations by workflow automation and streamlining of routine work tasks. The software enables businesses to replace unstructured work patterns with smart and automated workflows, creating a more connected and modern organization. ServiceNow allows employees to work from anywhere and collaborate efficiently the way they want to. At the same time, customers get what they need faster and in a straightforward fashion.

A hybrid workforce working from anywhere can be much more efficient and autonomous by using a tool like ServiceNow. Workflows streamline change management and grasp lasting opportunities to create modern services. ServiceNow combines machine learning with workflows and helps teams become more agile and businesses become faster and scalable.

Why integrate them

ServiceNow has become a preferred tool for IT Service Management for many companies. It is used to create issues and alerts related to your software. Jira is used to manage and resolve those issues. Almost every other tech company is using Jira as a project management tool.

In most cases, your ITSM team, which uses ServiceNow, and your development team, which uses Jira, are not in the same room. If you’re using the platforms without an integration, this means that one of the teams should manually log in the issues in Jira and the other one needs to update the respective tickets in ServiceNow, once they solve the problem.

When data is handled manually and is coming from different sources, you risk creating silos and duplicate or incomplete records. This often results in the incorrect handling of incidents or projects and teams not working in alignment. Delays are common in this situation, and your customer satisfaction metrics can suffer.

All this can be resolved by integration between Jira and ServiceNow. By connecting the two systems, you get the necessary data transferred automatically in real-time. This means the responsible team has all the details they need instantly and can resolve the issues much faster. If the integration is bi-directional, all updates will be synced, too. Once the issue is resolved, the client is automatically notified right away.

Common Use Cases

The ServiceNow Jira integration offers a few possible use cases where you can sync events, incidents, CMDB CIs, and more. Here is one of the most common Jira ServiceNow use case we have seen.

The helpdesk team receives a new incident in their ServiceNow queue. After investigating the issue, they found out that the problem is a result of a software bug that should be handled by the development team.

A team member needs to open a ticket in Jira manually, log-in all necessary details, attachments, and other log files. After the DevOps team receives the ticket and fixes the issue, they need to log in to ServiceNow and update/close the ticket.

This exercise is not only time-consuming, but very often leads to someone forgetting to log extra details, or to update the ticket status. Integration tools can simplify this process a lot.

When there is an integration in place, the communication between the helpdesk team and the developer working on the bug is effortless. It doesn’t require any additional tools: everything takes place in the comments. Log files, traces, issue links, or other attachments are automatically synchronized. This helps streamline defect tracking and resolution, improves change request management, and prevents any communication bottlenecks.

Once the developer fixes the issue, the ServiceNow incident is instantly updated. The end customer receives a notification that their problem is resolved.

Choosing the Right Integration Tool

Choosing the best integration tool for your specific scenario can sometimes be confusing. Often times it looks like it would be better to develop a tool internally, as it seems cheaper, faster, and more efficient. However, this is often not the case. Many customers choose to develop their integration internally, but soon realize that it is actually more expensive and requires a lot of time to set up and test. In the end, it usually turns out that the internal solution either does not meet all of the requirements or takes too much effort to be maintained up to date with the changing requirements.

You can see 5 things to consider when deciding whether to choose internal integrations or an out-of-the-box product here.

According to a survey we’ve conducted in Dec 2020, the most important concerns of companies that are looking to integrate Jira and ServiceNow are: meeting all the use case requirements, choosing the right product and maintaining the integration. Meeting all use case requirements is taking the lead, which is not surprising as companies have different requirements and specific scenarios and goals. Finding the best integration tool is not an easy job.

Here are some of the things that our clients have shared that are most important for them in an integration tool:

• No code/low code – even non-technical employees should be able to work with it
• Fitting complex and specific use cases – it should support deep integrations and mapping of specific fields
• Secure – security is something no company would want to compromise with
• Easy to use – the short learning curve helps integration projects be set up in a fraction of the time
• Maintenance – fast and reliable support is a necessity
• Regular updates – maintaining the latest versions of the integrated systems

Take these into consideration when scouting out for an integration solution.

As an example, we are going to look at ZigiWave’s ZigiOps integration platform, as it matches all of the requirements listed above.

What is ZigiOps and how to integrate Jira and ServiceNow in 5 minutes

ZigiOps is a no-code and at the same time powerful integration platform that supports 30+ of the most popular software tools used by enterprises.

Integrations with ZigiOps are simple to configure yet highly customizable. It has predefined integration templates, which you can use to connect ServiceNow to Jira in a few clicks. It goes beyond that and lets you customize which fields get transferred and updated from one system to another. Besides all the regular fields, log files, traces, issue links, or other attachments are easily synchronized. The tool can adapt to almost any use case scenario and complexity level.

As ZigiOps is a vendor-certified product, you don’t need to make any modifications to your integration in case you upgrade to a newer version of ServiceNow or Jira. When your business scales, your integrations scale with you. Growing requirements and complexity of the integrations are no problem for ZigiOps.

Last but not least, the ZigiOps support team is available to answer any questions and respond to your queries instantly.

Integrating Jira and ServiceNow with ZigiOps - Step by Step Guide

For more details, continue reading this article. The integration setup is straightforward and will take no longer than 5 minutes.

ZigiOps can be installed on-premises or accessed in the cloud. It is a standalone product, which makes it more secure as it only connects with your systems to transfer data but does not have direct access to all the information in your ServiceNow or Jira systems.

The installation process is straightforward and takes no more than 10-15 minutes. For a full overview on how to install ZigiOps, check here.

Once you have installed ZigiOps, you can login with your username and password:

Now it is time to choose the systems you want to integrate. In our case we first choose the ServiceNow one and fill three fields:

• ServiceNow system URL
• Username
• Password

After filling these, ZigiOps automatically checks the connection with ServiceNow and lets you know it’s successful.

Then you do absolutely the same thing for the Jira instance.

Once ZigiOps successfully connects to your ServiceNow and Jira instances, it’s time to configure the integration. ‘Configuration’ sounds like a complex process, yet in the case of ZigiOps it is rather fast and easy to do and does not require any previous technical background. Yes, it is that easy!

Click on the configurator from the left panel and choose what you want to synchronize between ServiceNow and Jira with our predefined templates—or start a new custom configuration. Here are some of the predefined templates:

• ServiceNow incident – Jira Task
• ServiceNow problem – Jira Task
• Jira bug – ServiceNow change request
• ServiceNow task – Jira feature
• ServiceNow task – Jira task
• Jira task - ServiceNow incident

After choosing your preferred template or creating a new custom configuration, it’s time to specify some things. Don’t worry, though; this will take no more than a few clicks.

1. Specify the source: in this case, ServiceNow
2. Fill-in the target system: Jira
3. State the frequency of collection: this tells ZigiOps how often to pull data from one source to update the other. You can set it up for 10 seconds, 1 minute, day, week, and so on.

The only thing left to do is configure the trigger conditions, meaning, tell ZigiOps when to pull information from ServiceNow and transfer it to Jira and vice versa.

Field mapping is also simplified in ZigiOps as the integration platform collects all the custom out-of-the-box system attributes of both ServiceNow and Jira. Pick the sources and target fields from the two systems, and you are done.

The final step, as in all projects, is hitting the Save and Activate Integration buttons, which can be found at the top of your screen.

Congrats, you successfully integrated ServiceNow and Jira in less than 5 minutes! (Not taking into account the installation of ZigiOps, but in total, this should be 10-15 minutes).

ZigiOps supports bi-directional integrations, so in your case, ticket creation and updates will be automatically synced between Jira and ServiceNow.

Some Final Thoughts

A crucial part of success is not only developing new products and features fast but also keeping customers and employees happy. Team collaboration and workflow efficiency are key for this. Integrating the systems different teams are using on a daily basis is becoming an integral part of the smart enterprises’ daily lives. Organizations simply cannot afford to keep their departments disconnected anymore, as manual transfer of data is time-consuming, prone to human mistakes and delays.

Choosing the right integration tool will help you resolve issues in a quick and efficient manner. An integration between Jira and ServiceNow will not only offload your employees from burdensome tasks but also speed up the flow of the entire project and boost customer satisfaction.

Choose smart automation and give ZigiOps a try. Schedule a demo now and start your free trial.