Zendesk, Service Now integration

Hey there,

Looks like this is possible via using automate.io. Otherwise this could be accomplished via a custom app utilizing Zendesk and Servicenow's API. 

Hope this helps!

Eric

Eric Nelson, thanks for the info. I've never heard about automate.io. yet, I've used exalate/workato. currently using zigiops for a number of reasons. but i guess the market is full of options.

Cornerstone Automation Systems Inc, hope you've resolved your use case.

Hi All,

We have managed to get Zendesk to talk to Service Now with no extras.

We have it set that once an email comes in and a ticket is opened a trigger send a reply to the customer informing them of such.

When Zendesk sends out this reply there is, at the bottom of the email the the customer would receive some white text. If Service Now ensures that this white text is captured and added into the body of any reply the send it will always update the correct Zendesk ticket.

This is all that is needed as Zendesk will reply and update on Service Now side with little issue. 

This also works with tickets Zendesk opens to Service Now, the white text need to be captured and added to the replies sent from Service Now. 

Jacob Bailey not clear - ANY white text? how would Zendesk know the ticket to update based on the white text that was included in  the ServiceNow email sent ? 

Moshe Anisman

When a ticket is generated by Zendesk and an email sent out, at the bottom of the email is some white text that Zendesk adds.

If this is lifted by service now and added to the bottom on the replys sent [by serivce now] then it will update the correct ticket on zendesk.

Cornerstone Automation Systems Inc,

There are some great ways to integrate the two platforms. It would be very helpful if you could provide a high level description of your desired integration and what you would like to send and receive from the two platforms. As this would be a great starting point to find the right solution.

I can however surely recommend a solution that would offer you a very flexible and powerful integration solution where you can mould the integration to your needs and requirements.

Have a look at Exalate. Also do let us know if you need any further help or assistance.

Jacob Bailey

Thank you for your input. Do you have any more info on how the configuration is done in Service now?

Marwan Al Jeburi Indeed - Exalate seem to have a solution. We are working with them. Thanks !

I came across this looking for something else but thought i'd chime in here even though this is old. I may create a new thread for this if people find this helpful.

I noticed that Zendesk customers are very confused about how to connect with third party systems aka, integrating, and I am/was one of these confused customers. Third party solutions seem to be suggested by Zendesk agents. To keep it in house, the solution that I found, painstakingly after many hours of research i might add, involves ZIS flow. ( Also front end app for OAuth Authorization button, if third party system is requiring OAuth).

You can learn a lot about ZIS flows here..
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/integration-services/getting-started/zis-code-playground/

So I set up two ZIS flows and one client side app. (ZIS was rather confusing to learn so if anyone is doing this, use the ZIS playground, amazon docs for AWS Step Functions, and some JQuery resource, in conjunction with the Zendesk docs. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/step-functions/latest/dg/concepts-states.html. )

ZIS Flow On Ticket Creation Event
This goes through a series of steps and results in a ticket in the third party system. For my use case, we connected with ServiceNow. This involved roughly the following...

•  Enters a choice state to confirm if the ZIS flow should continue running or not. based on requester id. This is how i differentiate between ZIS flows for different requesters/customers.

• Gets the ticket id of the current ticket. The values available during the ZIS flow events are limited and no custom field or comment values present so the next step is an api call to the current ticket to get all values.

• API call to get all Zendesk ticket fields.

• Then get all the values you need for the payload to be sent over. This will likely involve transforming data. For example - a custom field is not the same as the third party systems expected field value. Transform this in a ZIS transform action where you can sub your value for theirs and store result to an output variable.

•  Make the api call to third party endpoint to create a ticket ( depending on your use case) and store the response in the action output.
  
  
• Choice state to check response output variable for a success status of 201.

• Get their ticket i'd from the response output variable.

• Store their ticket id in a custom field in zendesk, I use "Customer Ticket ID" custom field. ( api call to zendesk ticket to update the ticket field)

• End ZIS flow.

Comment Added Zendesk Event

• This is how we communicate back and forth, through the Zendesk comments and ServiceNow worknotes. They have some app on their end that i had nothing to do with. All they had to do was set up the sending of their work notes over to the corresponding ticket in Zendesk using an apikey I create and revoke as needed.

•  When comment added in Zendesk flow starts, it enters a choice state to confirm that it should be running based on requester id field.

• Another choice state to check if comment is public. If it is public, the flow will continue. if private, the flow will stop and no comment sent over.

• API call into Zendesk to get new comment and third party ticket id that was stored in the "Customer Ticket ID" custom field, during the ticket create flow.

• API call to third party - ServiceNow in my case.
  
  
• Finish action containing message with the ticket id from ServiceNow. ("Comment successfully added to ServiceNow. Updated in Incident ####")

NOTES

• The ticket create and comment added events will both run on ticket creation because there are comments present ( ticket description). To get around this, check for time created in a choice state. If ticket was created at the same time that the comment added flow runs, stop the comment added flow. If you don't address this then the third party system will get a new ticket and a comment at the same time ( duplicate description).

• Have your customers post their comment to Zendesk as private. In my setup, if they add it as public, the add comments event ZIS flow checks for that and will continue to run. This could cause endless looping depending on how the third party system is set up or at minimum, will cause them to get their recently added comment back again.

I hope this helps shed some light on this for some people. I can't say for sure if this was the correct way of doing things or not but it's how my company is integrating and this is the result of countless hours of learning through trial and error.

Good luck!

Third-party services can be used to integrate Service Now and Zendesk. For example, you can use the Skyvia cloud service. No coding platform with a freemium version