ServiceNow Jira Integration Guide

Workflow automation is gaining more popularity as Service Desk and DevOps teams need to collaborate seamlessly. Integrating the tools you are using in the organization will remove silos, and chances of human mistakes and speed up the overall incident resolution cycle.

Most Service Desk teams use ServiceNow as an ITSM tool, while DevOps ones rely on Jira Cloud (or the on-premises version). Having a ServiceNow Jira integration in place is the best option for collaboration. If you are using both ServiceNow and Jira or you want to connect with your customers or partners, having a no-code integration tool is one of the options you should consider.

In this ServiceNow Jira integration guide, we will go over why you need to integrate Jira with ServiceNow. We will explore what are the characteristics of the best integration tool to connect ServiceNow with Jira and how to configure it in practice.

We will be using the ZigiOps integration platform for the purpose of showcasing how to establish a seamless Jira to ServiceNow integration.

Let’s dive in.

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 Atlassian Jira as a project management tool.

The bottom line: ServiceNow is used to create issues and alerts related to your software, and Jira Software is used to manage and resolve those issues.

In most cases, your Service Desk team, which uses ServiceNow, and your DevOps team, which uses Jira are not in the same room. This means that one of the teams has to manually log in the issues, tasks and more in their  Jira instance and the other one needs to update the respective tickets in ServiceNow, once they solve the problem.

Having said that, we will give two examples of Jira to ServiceNow integration use cases to illustrate further the importance of having it in place.

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 log a Jira issue or jira bug manually, and log-in all necessary details, attachments and other 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 it leads to someone forgetting to log extra details, or to update the ticket status.

Integration tools can simplify this process by creating a secure, bi–directional ServiceNow Jira integration. An integration tool will automatically create and update tickets with all the necessary information, attachments, comments, and more.

When choosing an integration platform which can integrate ServiceNow and Jira or any other tools, you need to take a few main things into consideration:

• A standalone integration platform: Standalone integration platforms are proven to be better than plug-ins. The reason behind this is to have a single source and UI for all your integrations, while at the same time not having to make any changes to your source and target systems. It is easier to do and much better in terms of security.
• No-Code Integration Tools: Writing scripts and lines of code is old-school, burdensome, and time-consuming. Not to mention you need to have knowledge of how to actually do that. No-code integration platforms give you the ability to build any integration in a few clicks from drop-down menus.
• Integration Customizations: Customizations and data mappings should be easy and straightforward. ServiceNow has a ton of fields that can be synchronized and having them preloaded and ready to load is the best approach.

There are of course more things to consider when choosing the best platform for your ServiceNow integration with Jira.

In this guide, we will be using the standalone no-code integration platform ZigiOps to illustrate how easy it is to integrate Jira and ServiceNow.

We will go through a step-by-step process of a sample ServiceNow Jira integration. This is also summed up and showcased in this video if you prefer watching over reading.

ZigiOps is a standalone integration platform, which has both an on-premise and cloud version. See the installation process here. The tool doesn’t store any of the transferred data from the ServiceNow Jira integration. It can be either installed on your premises, VM or you can leverage the AWS version of the platform. 

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. ZigiOps uses APIs to connect with ServiceNow and Jira. In our case we first choose the ServiceNow one and fill in three fields: 

• ServiceNow system URL 
• Username 
• Password 

The permissions you will need for ServiceNow depend on the integration use case. In this case, we will look at a ServiceNow Jira integration for incidents to tasks.

The permissions you need on the ServiceNow side are:

• incident (READ, WRITE, CREATE)
• sys_db_object (READ)
• sys_dictionary (READ)
• sys_journal_field (READ)
• sys_glide_object (READ)

After filling these, ZigiOps automatically checks the connection with ServiceNow and lets you know it’s successful. Meanwhile, in the background, the integration platform collects all metadata from ServiceNow and loads all available fields, in order to make the Jira ServiceNow integration easy to create and configure.

Once you have added ServiceNow, its time to add the destination system – Jira.

The login process is the same and you will need:

• Instance URL
• User
• Password

Alternatively, you can connect with a proxy. The permissions you need for Jira are:

• Add Comments
• Assign issues
• Browse Projects
• Create Attachments
• Create Issues
• Edit Issues
• Resolve Issues
• Transition issues

If you are using Jira cloud, you also need to fill in the API token.

After you have successfully connected your instances to ZigiOps, it’s time to start configuring the ServiceNow Jira integration.

ZigiOps comes with ready-to-use templates with default mappings for the most common integration use cases. All templates are fully customizable and support custom fields and can fit into any use case.

We also have an option for creating an integration from scratch.

Once you load the ServiceNow Jira integration template for incidents to tasks you need to define a couple of things from the drop-down menus:

• Place ServiceNow as a source system
• Put Jira as a destination system
• Choose the entity type from ServiceNow – in this case, incident
• Select the entity type from Jira – task

After that, you can define the triggers in the correlation section. This means that whenever there is new ticket creation, based on a number of rules, ZigiOps will pull it and load all the information in ServiceNow. ZigiOps supports a variety of things including:

• Reporter
• Priority
• Comments
• Attachments
• Description
• Issue Links and more

Once we are done with this, we can click “Save” and go to the advanced data mapping of the ServiceNow Jira integration.

Once we enter into the data mapping section we can define the type of trigger we would like to use. For this integration, we will be using “polling” which means ZigiOps will check for new incidents in ServiceNow on a predefined interval. You can set the interval for minutes, hours, or seconds.

After that, we can define the trigger conditions, meaning when this happens in ServiceNow with these corresponding field names – transfer them to Jira.

In the mapping options, we can define which fields get synchronized. In this case, we have:

• summary
• description
• priority
• attachments

The next step of the ServiceNow integration with Jira is to define when should ZigiOps check for updates in ServiceNow and transfer them to Jira.

You can again define the polling interval for hours, minutes, or seconds.

ZigiOps will check ServiceNow for changes every 60 seconds, transform the updates from the incidents, and transfer them to Jira, based on the mappings we have defined.

ZigiOps will find the corresponding mapping field in Jira and update it with an attachment, comment, or anything we have defined.

After that, we can define the updates on the ServiceNow incidents, based on the actions your DevOps team has taken and placed in the Jira task.

• ZigiOps will poll Jira for changes on the task/s every 60 seconds, or per the interval you select.
• The integration platform will transform the Jira task updates to the ServiceNow incidents, based on the mapping
• ZigiOps will find the corresponding ServiceNow incident and update or close it, if the DevOps team have finalized it.

Once we are done with that we can save the and enable the integration.

Choosing the most suitable integration tool for your ServiceNow Jira integration can sometimes create a fuss in the organization. A common misconception is that internal Jira ServiceNow integration development is faster, cheaper, and more effective—unfortunately, this is not the case. Many customers choose to develop their own ServiceNow Jira integration 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.

The most important things you should be looking at when comparing ready integration platforms for the ServiceNow Jira integration versus internal development are:

• Meeting all use case requirements – ZigiOps supports 99% of use cases for all of its integrations. With internal development, you will need a Business Analyst to define what you need and only then proceed to development.
• Budget and timelines – You can launch your integration in a few minutes with a fixed price, instead of spending months on paying salaries to make the integration happen.
• Maintaining the integration – We have a dedicated support team, who are taking care of the upgrades and have the know-how of Jira and ServiceNow and all other systems we connect. They are available and resolve issues within hours. With internal development, you will need a dedicated engineer to take care of the integration, which will cost you more.

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 are using the ZigiOps integration platform for this ServiceNow Jira integration 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 integrate ServiceNow with 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 for a stable ServiceNow Jira integration 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.

There are many tools on the market that can integrate ServiceNow with Jira. The question here is how stable are they. What amount of data can they transfer? What are the options for customizations? How about the support? And many other questions.

We would like to provide four key points that make ZigiOps stand above all other tools when considering a Jira to ServiceNow integration.

• No-code integrations. Easy to create, maintain and change your ServiceNow Jira integration.
• Customizable templates. To cover the most popular ServiceNow Jira integration cases and give you the opportunity to sync whatever you want.
• Unlimited users and workflows. Sync as many ServiceNow instances as Jira ones and transfer as much data as you need. ZigiOps does not have a limitation on those.
• Excellent customer support. Whenever you need help with your Jira ServiceNow integration – our support team is available to assist and resolve your issues within hours.