ServiceNow and JIRA are two of the most popular applications in today’s IT department. Because of this, there is a great demand to have these two apps fully and seamlessly integrated. ONEiO provides the fastest and most cost-effective solution for integrating your ITSM and Development tools. And better yet, you can get started today for free.
Summary:
- Why integrate ServiceNow and JIRA
- 10 Steps to integrating ServiceNow and JIRA
- Step 1: Setup your ONEiO subscription
- Step 2: Creating your first endpoints
- Step 3: Adding the JIRA endpoint in ONEiO
- Step 4: Creating your JIRA Webhook (JIRA→ONEiO)
- Step 5: Creating your 'Outbound integration (ONEiO→JIRA)
- Step 6: Adding a ServiceNow endpoint to ONEiO
- Step 7: Create the inbound (ServiceNow→ONEiO) endpoint
- Step 8: Create the outbound endpoint (ONEiO→ServiceNow)
- Step 9: Creating a connection between JIRA and ServiceNow
- Step 10: Contact us
Why Integrate ServiceNow and Jira?
ServiceNow is one of the most widely used Service Management platforms across the globe. It is popular with the enterprise IT and Business Service space due to its broad range of features and services. And according to Business Insider, ServiceNow currently makes up about 51% of the Experience Management sector. So, it is a very viable and well-trusted tool for the job.
Atlassian's Jira is equally as popular in the Software and Product Development space. Born from the Lean Movement as a simple way to digitize the Kanban process. Jira was originally launched in 2002 as an issue-tracking tool. However, it has since become one of the world’s number-one project and task management tools.
We often combine the power of Jira and ServiceNow. Not only because we want to see the tasks and activities of IT support and development together, but because we want to greatly improve and enable collaboration across the people and teams who make up our IT, Development, and Business Services departments.
Integration is one of the single most impactful capabilities you can invest in for improving widespread collaboration. This is because the seamless exchange and increased transparency of data, workflow, and activity is a huge contributing factor to reducing collaborative friction between teams.
Simply put, if people can see the bigger picture in real-time… they can act quicker and make better decisions.
So, let’s get started! Keep reading on if you want to learn the fastest and most effective way of connecting up ServiceNow and Jira… without touching a line of code.
10 steps to integrating ServiceNow and JIRA
Step 1: Set Up Your ONEiO Subscription
Okay, this bit is easy. Head over to Get Started and select the option to sign up.
You'll be taken to our signup page, where you enter your email address. We’ll send you a quick confirmation email, with a verification code. Continue the process and enter the required information to create your user account. Once you're done, we'll take you directly to ONEiO. You will have access to your 14-day free trial, with full use of the ONEiO Integration Automation Platform.
Step 2: Creating Your first endpoints
From the ONEiO dashboard, look down the menu on the left-hand side and look for the ‘Endpoints’ section. Once you select Endpoints a new window will appear showing your existing endpoints (which will probably be none right now!), then at the top of the screen you will see the option to ‘Create New Endpoint’.
Hit that button and a small module window will appear, offering a wide range of pre-built endpoints to select from, including a number of popular service providers. But for now, we just want to focus on ServiceNow and Jira, which are featured in the self-service offering of your free trial.
Worth Knowing: Endpoints Vs APIs and Adapters
An Endpoint is a package of adapters, APIs, code, and rules. It is a bi-directional function that enables the application it connects with to have a ‘many-to-many’ or unlimited capacity to communicate and integrate with other tools and services. Packaging up integration tools and features into endpoints is the key to enabling us to manage integrations in a 100% codeless way.
Step 3: Adding the JIRA endpoint in ONEiO
From the ‘Create New Endpoint’ module, select JIRA and you will see a configuration window for ONEiO and JIRA appear. There are two tabs within this window… a ‘General Info’ tab and an ‘Entity Types’ tab. For now, we just want to focus on the General tab.
The first section of the General tab allows us to name our Integration and then add the of our Jira instance (just the URL you use to login Jira). You will also want to set the status of the integration to ‘Active’. The name can be anything you choose, just make sure it is something you can easily recognize later on such as ‘My Jira’ or ‘Jira Connection’.
You can then hit ‘Test Connection’ and this will ping your Jira URL just to make sure this is a valid URL, which can indeed be used for the integration. If the test isn’t successful, double-check your URL (typically your URL is something like ‘http://yourcompany.atlassian.net’).
If your test comes back as successful, move down into the next box, where we will need to add in our Jira Webhook. When this is set up, this is what we then refer to as your Inbound integration and you will see under the ‘Jira → ONEiO’ display in the General Tab.
Step 4: Creating your JIRA Webhook (JIRA → ONEiO)
To complete your inbound integration from JIRA to ONEIO, you will need to head over to JIRA (Using a new tab or window for JIRA and be sure to keep ONEiO open in the current tab).
Once in Jira, follow the Menu through from System → Advanced → Webhooks
From the Webhooks screen, select ‘Add A Webhook’. Give your Webhook a Name (it doesn’t need to be the same as the name in ONEiO), then be sure to enable the Webhook before saving.
From here, you will need to quickly return to ONEiO, where you will see in the JIRA endpoint window a field with a long URL called ‘Webhook Target Address’. Copy this URL to your clipboard and head back over to the webhook menu in JIRA. Then paste this URL into the URL field in JIRA, just below the Webhook name field.
What you will want to do next is scroll down the page and select which ‘issue’ you would like included within this Webhook. You can select from a range of fields and data types. To get started, we often find that selecting 'created' and 'updated'’ from the Issues and Comments section is good enough for now. We can then look at adding more fields and filters further down the line.
Diving a little deeper…
You can use the "entity types" tab in ONEiO to manually set how issues get mapped across to the two applications. As a default, any issue coming across from JIRA will be categorized as an ‘incident’. But you can simply add new entity types such as ‘service request’ or ‘event’ in order to expand the range of issue categories you want to use.
You can now test by sending messages in JIRA and you will see this appear in the event log in ONEIO. You can do this by simply creating a new issue in JIRA…
…then once you have saved the new issue, head back over to ONEiO and select the ‘Messages’ section from the left-hand menu. In this menu, you will now see your first message appearing from JIRA in the inbound column of the page.
You might notice that nothing has appeared in the Outbound column as yet. This is because we have only set up the ‘Inbound (JIRA → ONEiO) part of the integration. So, we now need to move on to the Outbound (ONEiO → JIRA) setup. But don’t worry, this bit is even easier!
Step 5: Creating your ‘Outbound integration (ONEIO → JIRA)
For this next step, we need to create a user in Jisa whose credentials we can then use to create and add the API token within ONEIO. So, head back over to Jira and follow the menu option through from Settings → User Management → Invite Users (button)
Important: You must create a new user for this process, as using your own existing credentials for authenticating a Webhook doesn’t work.
However, you do only need to use an email address at this stage and we often recommend having a specific alias for this part of the process, so that it is easy to recognize later down the line.
Pro tip: If your team use G-Suite you can auto-generate an alias such as yourname+webhook@yourcompany.com
A confirmation will be then sent to this address, so make sure you can easily access the mailbox you have used for the new user. Head over to that inbox, open the email, and select the confirmation link.
You will then need to Logout of Jira and log back in as the new user you have just set up.
Next, you will need to create an API token in JIRA.
(this can also be found in the ONEiO endpoint configuration screen under the ‘ONEiO help centre’ link.)
From this page, you just need to hit the ‘Create an API Token’ button, give the token a name and select create. Jira will then provide you with a Token which you will need to copy to your clipboard.
Once this is done, go back to ONEiO and in the Endpoint window, look over at the ‘Outbound Jira → ONEiO’ section on the right-hand side. Then fill in the three fields with the Username and password you created, and then paste in the API Token which should be on your clipboard.
You are now done (but don’t forget to log out of JIRA and then back in again with your usual credentials… as that could get pretty confusing very quickly).
If you now go back to the Messages section in ONEiO and run a few tests. You will be able to see messages moving back and forth across both sides of the integration. If you can see messages in both columns, your Endpoint is now up and running. Congratulations!
Next stop… ServiceNow.
Step 6: Adding a ServiceNow Endpoint to ONEiO
Adding Jira is done and dusted. Now we need to create our ServiceNow endpoint. However, one important fact worth noting at this point is that ONEiO is a ‘Hub’. So instead of seeing this as a direct integration between ServiceNow and Jira, we see it as joining the two applications to a whole network of integration possibilities.
So for example, if later on, we want to integrate ServiceNow and Jira to something like ZenDesk, all we would need to do is add Zendesk to ONEiO. We would not need to create a brand integration. For those building ‘integration at scale’ this is a significant time-saving and waste-free solution.
To get started with adding ServiceNow, we take exactly the same approach as we did with Jira. From the ONEiO dashboard, select ‘Endpoints’ from the left-hand menu, hit the ‘Create New Endpoint’ button, but this time of course we choose ServiceNow from the selection of available endpoints (Additional help can be found on the ServiceNow Support Page).
As before, you need to add a name for your Service Endpoint (again, this can be anything, just make sure it is something easy to recognize later on), then paste your ServiceNow URL into the URL field.
One important difference for ServiceNow, is that we must select a time zone. This is just a dropdown field in ONEiO below the URL field. The reason we have to do this is that messages from ServiceNow don’t have a centralized or pre-defined time zone to work from, so ONEiO has to provide that bit of data for each message itself.
Step 7: Create the inbound (ServiceNow → ONEiO) Endpoint
To set up the Inbound endpoint, we now need to create a REST message in ServiceNow. Logged in as an admin, open your ServiceNow dashboard, then follow the path:
System → Web Services → REST Message
From here, create a new message and include any standard configuration data you would tend to use for doing this. Once your REST message is set up, select ‘Preview’ and allow the preview to load. You can then Select ‘Commit Update’ and this will generate your REST Message.
You then need to return to the main REST Message dashboard, select the Message you have just created, then set the credentials required for using this message. This is the bit we will then need to enter into ONEiO.
The Username you will need to use for this is found in the ONEiO Endpoint window:
And you just enter that into the credentials fields within the ServiceNow setup screen.
You can now test your Endpoint as you did with JIRA. And if you can see messages coming through, this is now all set up and you can move on to configuring your entity types and then setting up the outbound endpoint!
Step 8: Create the outbound endpoint (ONEiO → ServiceNow)
We now need to create the Outbound endpoint so that ONEiO can successfully send data to ServiceNow. Within the new ServiceNow endpoint in ONEiO you should see that some API credentials are already populated, with username ONEIO. So, the next step is to create this user within ServiceNow.
Head back over to ServiceNow and follow the path:
System Security → Users → Create New User
Then create a new user with the username ONEIO. You then need to add some roles to this user, which are: Web_service_Admin and ITIL
Once this is done, just make sure that the passwords you have created in ServiceNow for this user, match the password you have entered in the ONEiO endpoint too.
And congratulations, you now have both your JIRA and ServiceNow Endpoints setup and ready to go. The next step is getting them to talk to each other. But don’t panic… this bit is super easy!
Step 9: Creating a connection Between JIRA and ServiceNow
From the ONEiO dashboard, select the ‘Routing Rules’ from the left-hand menu.
Now, you could set up these rules by hand. But we have built a fantastic shortcut for you here. To get you started, you can actually use our ‘Rule Robot’, who will create all you’re the basic rules you need in place for your integration to work right away.
To do this, from the Rule Routing screen select ‘Integrate Endpoints’ in the top right-hand corner.
You will now see a nine-step window appear and you simply need to follow each step, selecting which entity types and data you want to be included in your integration.
The first four steps will take you through naming and entering your field and entity types for JIRA, so be sure to have the names of those fields and processes on hand.
For example, select an ‘Incident’ as your Entity Type, then enter the Issue ID used by JIRA for this field.
These steps will need repeating this same process but for ServiceNow, where you will probably have a wider range of fields and issue IDs to choose from.
And here comes the final piece of the puzzle, where ONEiO will now automatically create the integrations and all the routing rules you need in place, based on the data you have just given.
Hit done, and your ServiceNow ↔ JIRA integration is complete!
You can of course review, edit, and manually add new rules, within the Rules Routing window from the left-hand menu on the ONEiO dashboard.
You can put your Integration to the test by creating and editing new issues, incidents, and service requests from within ServiceNow and JIRA.
You will then be able to check across both applications and see in real-time how the tickets update each other in perfect synchronization.
Step 10: Contact us
If you would like to see a live demonstration of this walk-through, you can watch our latest DEEP DIVE Webinar, where our CPO Janne Kärkkäinen, takes you through step-by-step on how to create your Endpoints, Rules and Integrations.
If you are looking to get started, Contact Us and we can help get you up and running.
If you need any further assistance on your setup, our Support Page has step-by-step guides for both JIRA Integrations and ServiceNow Integrations.
Read more:
The ultimate guide to application integration
ServiceNow MS Teams integration for better incident management
Better alternative for ServiceNow LogicMonitor integration
Get started: Book a call with our ServiceNow and Jira integration experts!
About ONEiO
ONEiO Cloud Corporation is a cloud-native integration service provider connecting people, processes, and tools – enabling seamless collaboration without traditional integration hassle. Founded in 2011 in Helsinki, Finland, and now with offices in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, ONEiO’s integration as a service enables an effortless and easy way to integrate without required skills and removes the problems related to traditional integration delivery, maintenance and reliability.
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