Using JEMHC in Jira with Third Party Systems

Owned by Ryan Clifton
Feb 10, 2023
3 min read

JEMHC can work with third party systems to associate Issues between each system and share updates about the issues.

There are two ways this can be configured. The first way is using the Third Party System as the primary system that will handle the initial Issue creation. The Second way is using Jira as the primary system for receiving and sending notifications to the third party system.

Third Party System as Primary

This works by the Third Party System sending email notifications to Jira and getting processed by JEMHC to gather the Third party System Incident Key from the subject of the email and then saving this value into a Custom Field to Associate the Jira Issue with the third party Issue. For more info about foreign key association see: Understand how Issue association works | Regexp foreign key association

Jira being the Primary Issue System

For Jira to be the Primary system you will need to set up a round trip configuration to enable Jira to receive email notifications from the Third Party System and sending notifications to the Third Party System to update the Issue/Incident in the Third Party System.

Here we go over the flow, using ServiceNow as the example Third Party System:

Jira Creates an Issue and sends creation notification to ServiceNow

  • Create an Issue in Jira (ABC-123) adding the ServiceNow Email as a ‘request participant’ or Email only user.

  • JEMH sends a notification to ServiceNow, which creates an INCident

  • ServiceNow sends an INCident Created notification back to Jira which must contain the Jira Issue Key (ABC-123) in subject in order to associate with the Jira issue (ABC-123)

  • The INCident email subject needs to also have the INCident number within the subject so that JEMHC can extract this from the email subject by using the Regexp Field Processor. Then store this value in a text single line field, for future use in other flows

  • To stop replies of updates by ServiceNow, Disable “Notify Users Of Their Actions When Update” so that issue updates that are triggered by ServiceNow do not get echoed back to ServiceNow.

Learning TODO’s:

ServiceNow drives an update

  • A user updates a ServiceNow INCident which includes Jira as a recipient. ServiceNow sends a notification to Jira (assuming the Jira Issue key is in the subject)

  • Jira Updates the associated Issue with the content from the email

  • JEMH drives a notification to the participants on the Issue except the ‘sender address’ that just made the change.

Jira User commenting

  • Jira User comments.

  • JEMH sends notifications out to participants including ServiceNow, but you will need the INC# stored in the Custom Field (as per the above Create flow) to be placed within the subject to associate this reply with the ServiceNow ticket.

  • ServiceNow updates their Issue with the Jira content.

  • ServiceNow must not echo the Jira comment back as this would create a duplicate comment, resulting in duplicate notifications to all the users involved (not a loop, just spam). This will need to be configured on ServiceNow and is out of scope for our support.

Learning TODO’s