Get started with Jira Service Management for admins
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Integrate with ServiceNow
This article highlights a new alerting feature that's natively available in Jira Service Management which is gradually rolling out to some Jira Service Management Cloud customers. It may not yet be visible or available on your site.
What does the integration offer?
Jira Service Management has an application in the ServiceNow Store which allows bi-directional functionality between Jira Service Management and ServiceNow. Use the integration to send ServiceNow incident events to Jira Service Management with detailed information and to forward Jira Service Management alerts as incidents to ServiceNow.
Jira Service Management determines the right people to notify based on on-call schedules– notifies via email, text messages (SMS), phone calls, and iOS & Android push notifications, and escalates alerts until the alert is acknowledged or closed.
How does the integration work?
When an incident is created in ServiceNow, an alert is created in Jira Service Management.
When an incident is resolved/closed in ServiceNow, the alert is closed in Jira Service Management.
When the incident is assigned to a group in ServiceNow, the corresponding team is added to the alert if the name of the group in ServiceNow and the name of the team in Jira Service Management match.
When the incident is assigned to a user in ServiceNow, the alert in Jira Service Management is assigned to the corresponding user.
User & Group synchronization (optional).
Alert action mapping
If Send Alert Updates Back to ServiceNow selection is enabled, actions are executed in ServiceNow when the chosen action is executed in Jira Service Management for alerts which are created by the ServiceNow integration.
If Create ServiceNow Incidents for Jira Service Management Alerts selection is enabled, actions are executed in ServiceNow when the chosen action is executed in Jira Service Management for alerts which have a source other than the ServiceNow integration.
The feature is explained in more detail later on this page.
Set up the integration
Adding multiple ServiceNow integrations for different Jira Service Management teams is not supported without code modification in Jira Service Management ServiceNow application and configuration modification in Jira Service Management.
ServiceNow is a bidirectional integration. Setting it up involves the following steps:
Add a ServiceNow integration in Jira Service Management
Configure the integration in ServiceNow
Add a ServiceNow integration
If you're using the Free or Standard plan in Jira Service Management, you can only add this integration from your team’s operations page. To access the feature through Settings (gear icon) > Products (under JIRA SETTINGS) > OPERATIONS, you need to be on Premium or Enterprise plan.
Adding an integration from your team’s operations page makes your team the owner of the integration. This means Jira Service Management only assigns the alerts received through this integration to your team.
To add a ServiceNow integration in Jira Service Management, complete the following steps:
Go to your team’s operations page.
On the left navigation panel, select Integrations and then Add integration.
Run a search and select “ServiceNow”.
On the next screen, enter a name for the integration.
Optional: Select a team in Assignee team if you want a specific team to receive alerts from the integration.
Select Continue.
The integration is saved at this point.Expand the Steps to configure the integration section and copy the API key.
You will use this key while configuring the integration in ServiceNow later.Select Turn on integration.
The rules you create for the integration will work only if you turn on the integration.
Configure the integration in ServiceNow
1. Go to the ServiceNow Store and download the Jira Service Management application.
2. Go to System Applications > Applications > Downloads to finish the installation of the app.
3. Create/Update a user with roles x_86994_jsm.jsm_app_role, import_transformer, and import_set_loader in the instance. Assign a password to the user. This password can be permanent or temporary. After adding the Jira Service Management application to the instance, the Jira Service Management application is available for you in the navigator.
4. Under the Jira Service Management application menu, select Jira Service Management Configuration.
5. Paste the API key previously copied from Jira Service Management into Jira Service Management API Key.
6. Leave the Jira Service Management API URL field as-is, if not using Jira Service Management Sandbox.
7. Check Use Synchronization option to value, if synchronizing users & groups in ServiceNow with Jira Service Management is desired.
For more information, check out the "User & Group Synchronization (Optional)" section in this article.
8. Check Use Acknowledge Action in Jira Service Management Instead of Assigning the Alert When the Incident is Assigned to Somebody in ServiceNow option if it is preferred to acknowledge the alert instead of assigning it to a user in Jira Service Management when an incident is assigned to someone in ServiceNow. For more information, please check out the "Acknowledging the Alert in Jira Service Management When the Incident is Assigned in ServiceNow (Optional)" section below.
9. Save the configuration in ServiceNow.
10. Go back to ServiceNow integration page in Jira Service Management.
11. Populate the "ServiceNow Instance Subdomain" field with the subdomain of the ServiceNow instance.
Fill the ServiceNow Instance Subdomain field with only the subdomain of the URL of the ServiceNow Instance. For example, fill the field with "sample" for https://sample.service-now.com
User roles
If you are not seeing the executed actions translate back into ServiceNow and there are no errors in the ServiceNow or Jira Service Management logs, we will need to add in an additional two roles for the User. The SOAP and REST roles should also be added to give the User the appropriate access to make these changes.
12. Populate the "ServiceNow User ID" and "ServiceNow Password" fields with the user ID and the password of the user created/updated earlier.
Map action alerts
Jira Service Management allows customers to define action mappings between Jira Service Management actions and ServiceNow actions.
For alerts created by ServiceNow
Use this section to map Jira Service Management actions to ServiceNow actions when the source of the alert is ServiceNow (i.e When the alert is created by ServiceNow integration.)
Map different Jira Service Management actions to different ServiceNow actions. For example, add a note to a ServiceNow incident when the alert is acknowledged in Jira Service Management. In order to do this, define "If alert is acknowledged in Jira Service Management, add it as a work note to the incident in ServiceNow." mapping in "Send Alert Updates Back to ServiceNow” section.
For other Jira Service Management alerts
Use this section to map Jira Service Management actions to ServiceNow actions when the source of the alert is NOT ServiceNow (i.e When the alert is created by another integration.)
For this purpose, use Create ServiceNow Incidents for Jira Service Management Alerts section. In order to use this functionality, map one Jira Service Management action to "create an incident" ServiceNow action. The Jira Service Management action doesn't have to be "alert is created", it can be other actions as well.
"a tag is added to the alert" and a "custom action is executed on alert" actions differ from other actions. When one of these actions is selected, an extra field is available to enter for which tags or for which custom action this mapping works.
Enter multiple tags by separating the tags with a comma. If multiple tags are entered, the mapping works if the alert has one or more of the specified tags. Leave the tags field empty for the mapping to work for any tag.
If an Jira Service Management action is mapped to multiple ServiceNow actions, an error occurs except for the "a tag is added to the alert" and "a custom action is executed on alert" actions. Save multiple mappings for these actions, because they differ by the given tags and the given custom action names.
Jira Service Management Alert Alias field in ServiceNow not matching Original Alert Alias
In case when an Jira Service Management alert creates a new incident in ServiceNow, the og_alert_alias field in incident should be same as the alert alias, if it is not then check the incident create webservice script & business rule scripts in Jira Service Management App installed in customer's ServiceNow instance, most probably they have been modified and og_alert_alias field mapping tampered with.
One more possibility is that user has enabled "Run Business Rule" flag in "Jira Service Management Web Svc Create" webservice of Jira Service Management app installed in their instance due to which it might trigger other business rules which can transform og_alert_alias field to some wrong value.
By default "Run Business Rule" flag in "Jira Service Management Web Svc Create" is disabled when the app is installed
Acknowledge the Alert in Jira Service Management when the Incident is assigned in ServiceNow (Optional)
Currently, when an incident is assigned to someone in ServiceNow, the alert is assigned to the same user in Jira Service Management.
Assigning an alert to a user in Jira Service Management does not stop the notification flow.
Instead, the notification flow is stopped when the incident is assigned to someone in ServiceNow. There is an option for this behavior in our latest Jira Service Management application in ServiceNow.
It is not enabled by default. Check the option to value in order to acknowledge the alert instead of assigning it to the user in Jira Service Management.
Send payload to a custom-scripted REST API source endpoint in ServiceNow (Optional)
Our integration with ServiceNow supports sending a payload from an alert action to a custom endpoint in ServiceNow.
Map any alert action to the "send to custom endpoint" ServiceNow action, and when those alert actions take place, a payload is sent to the endpoint specified.
The payload we send for this "send to custom endpoint" ServiceNow action is similar to the payload of our Webhook integration except it does not include the "integrationName" and "integrationId" fields. Check out this document to get more information about the payload.
We've already created a Scripted REST API Resource for our latest Jira Service Management application in ServiceNow called "sample".
We've developed a script to make an HTTP request to our Alert API and get the alert data from our Alert API and log it to the application logs as an example for this "sample" Scripted REST API Resource.
Map a custom Jira Service Management action called "sample" to the "send to custom endpoint" ServiceNow action and enter "sample" as the custom endpoint to test the feature.
This way, when the "sample" custom action is executed on an alert in Jira Service Management, it is forwarded to the "sample" endpoint in ServiceNow.
User & Group Synchronization (Optional)
Our integration with ServiceNow supports synchronizing users and groups in ServiceNow with Jira Service Management.
Note that the synchronization is performed for the users and groups added to ServiceNow after the synchronization feature is enabled. We create a user in Jira Service Management for each such user in ServiceNow and we create a team in Jira Service Management for each such group in ServiceNow.
When a user is created, updated, or deleted, or a group is created or deleted in ServiceNow, the changes are applied to the Jira Service Management account if the "Use Synchronization" option is checked in the "Jira Service Management Configuration" form in ServiceNow.
In Jira Service Management-ServiceNow integration page, UNCHECK "Restrict Access to Configuration" option, if it is checked.
We get email, full name, business phone, mobile phone, and timezone fields of a user from ServiceNow and use those fields in Jira Service Management when creating a user.
The role of a user created in Jira Service Management will be "User" regardless of his/her role in ServiceNow.
When one or more of the full name, business phone, mobile phone, and timezone fields of a user change in ServiceNow, those fields are changed in Jira Service Management, too.
Jira Service Management does NOT allow special characters or spaces in team names, but ServiceNow does. So, we replace disallowed characters and spaces before creating a team in Jira Service Management when a group is created in ServiceNow with those characters in the name.
Updating group name or group description in ServiceNow will NOT update team name and team description in Jira Service Management.
When a user is added to/removed from a group in ServiceNow, the user is added to/removed from the team in Jira Service Management.
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