An overview of the current landscape
In the current work-from-anywhere setup, where employees communicate with each other primarily online, the overall operational effectiveness is put into question. Teams are spread around different cities, sometimes even countries, and need to collaborate and meet virtually. This can cause delays in issue resolution and data synchronization. Application and performance monitoring can also suffer. Are you willing to put your operational efficiency at risk?
Teams use different software tools, which makes the data exchange a rather complicated and burdensome manual process.
Companies are freeing their employees from manual work by smartly automating the data transfer process with integrations.
Fortunately, you can integrate the systems your teams are using—in this blog post we will review the Jira ServiceNow integration and how to enable it with ZigiOps. As an example, we will use ZigiOps as a standalone integration platform.
Why do a Jira - ServiceNow integration?
ServiceNow has become a preferred tool for IT Service Management for many companies. Listed as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM, ServiceNow has gained a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable software system for incident and event management.
Jira, on the other hand, is the first thing that pops into your mind when talking about agile software development. Almost every other tech company is using Jira as a project management tool.
The bottom line: ServiceNow is used to create issues and alerts related to your software, and Jira is used to manage and resolve those issues.
In most cases, your ITSM team, which uses ServiceNow, and your development team, which uses Jira are not in the same room. This means that one of the teams has to manually log in the issues in Jira and the other one needs to update the respective tickets in ServiceNow, once they solve the problem.
This can be a very time-consuming process, which is prone to human mistakes, delays, and lost tickets. It can also be easily improved by connecting ServiceNow with Jira so that issues get automatically transferred and updated between the two systems.
A Common ServiceNow-Jira Integration Use Case
The service desk team receives a new incident in their ServiceNow queue. After investigating the issue, they find out that the problem is a result of a software bug and 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 almost every time leads to someone forgetting to log extra details, or to update the ticket status.
Integration tools can simplify this process by creating a bi-directional integration between Jira and ServiceNow. An integration tool like ZigiOps will automatically create and update tickets with all the necessary information, attachments, comments and more.
You can check out this video, which sums up the entire configuration process. For more details, continue reading this article. The integration setup is straightforward and will take no longer than 5 minutes.
Initial Setup of the Jira - ServiceNow Integration
1. Installing the ZigiOps Integration Platform
ZigiOps is a standalone integration platform, which has both an on-premise and cloud version. The tool doesn’t store any of the transferred data between Jira and ServiceNow. It can be either installed on your premises or you can use the cloud version.
2. Configuring the Jira – ServiceNow Integration
Once you have installed or connected to ZigiOps you can log in 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.
3. Configuration Setup
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:
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- ServiceNow incident – Jira Task
- ServiceNow problem – Jira Bug
- 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.
- Specify the source: in this case ServiceNow
- Fill-in the target system: Jira
- 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. Check out this video to see a demo of how this works.
Choosing the Right Integration Tool
Choosing the most suitable integration tool can sometimes create fuss in the organization. A common misconception is that internal development is faster, cheaper, and more effective—unfortunately, this is not the case. Many customers choose to develop their integrations internally, but after a while realize that this initiative is more expensive, requires a lot of time to configure and test, and in the end, does not fulfill all the requirements. For more information on the difference between internal integration development vs an out-of-the-box product, check our article on the topic.
We’ve conducted a survey among people who consider integrating ServiceNow with Jira in December 2020. The most important things they take into consideration boil down to:
- Meeting all use case requirements – 54% of respondents
- Choosing the right product – 31%
- Maintaining the integration – 15%
It is not a surprise that meeting all use case requirements is taking the lead. Companies face different scenarios and have specific goals, which are not met by all integration tools on the market.
As mentioned above, we will use the ZigiOps integration platform for this guide, as it meets the above-mentioned requirements with:
- Simple to configure, yet highly customizable integrations: ZigiOps 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. This meets nearly all use case requirements as the tool can adapt to almost any use case scenario and complexity level. If your business needs something very niche and specific, which is not currently offered as a customization by ZigiOps, our integration team can develop it within a few weeks.
- Automatic upgrades: 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.
- Customer Support: The ZigiOps support team is available to answer any questions and respond to your queries instantly.
- Scalable integrations: Ideally, your business will grow over the years. Don’t worry about your integrations, though: with ZigiOps, they grow at the same pace.The product has a lot of other features, which you can find here. Now, let us proceed to the actual Jira – ServiceNow Integration
- Customer Support: The ZigiOps support team is available to answer any questions and respond to your queries instantly.
Some Final Thoughts on Integrations
Team collaboration and work effectiveness are two of the main pieces of your operational efficiency puzzle. Nowadays, when everyone on the market is going all-in, a crucial part of success is developing new product features fast and keeping customers and employees happy.
Resolving issues in a quick and efficient manner plays a key role here. Choosing the right integration tool will not only heavily offload your employees from burdensome tasks, but also speed up the entire new features development flow with smart automation.
Choose simplicity and give ZigiOps a try. Schedule a demo now and start your free trial
Resources:
*System Integration Market Size, Share, & Trends Analysis Report
