Slack + JIRA + Zapier = ❤
Tracking an IT Support teams’ performance has been fairly hit or miss. There tends to always be walk-ups and Slack messages that will inevitably fall between the cracks and not be tracked in the analytics used in your ticketing system. Whether that’s JIRA or ZenDesk or otherwise.
I always try to integrate tracking into JIRA, however asking my team to manually create tickets based on Slack messages doesn’t seem efficient and neither does auto-tagging every new Slack channel message as a JIRA ticket. There has to be a happy medium. This is where this particular Zapier integration comes into place.
By leveraging reactions to comments in Slack as a trigger in Zapier you can create a myriad of automation options as a result. It also allows your team or entire org to easily create a JIRA ticket that is trackable all from within Slack.
In this case, we simply needed to be able tag/react a comment in Slack and create a JIRA ticket.
In the images below you can see the Slack comment and reactions added.
We used the JIRA reaction as well as the exclamation reaction. :
In the images below you can see the resulting JIRA ticket created :
This integration is made up of the following recipe in an integration software called Zapier.
1.Slack is Triggered by reaction
2. Find JIRA User
3.Generate a JIRA ticket and include user info and summary from the Slack post.
- For this we are selecting the Slack trigger workflow in Zapier, labeled New Reaction Added.
Then we must parse the values returned from Slack. There’s a bunch of metadata fields to pull off of but for these we will be using the ‘Message User Profile Email’ and then find a user in JIRA with that same email.
We then need to specify the reaction/emoticon that triggers the Zap and alternatively the channels/users to trigger off of. For this example we will only be specifying a channel and not specific users. If you’d really like to lock this down, i’d recommend specifying users.
We are naming the :jira: Reaction and specifying to only look in the #us-helpdesk channel.
2. We now need to add a bit of fancy and do a lookup of the Slack user in JIRA.
This is what that looks like in Zapier :
We’re specifying the Slack value we got earlier :
Message User Profile Email
3. We’re finally onto the final step of creating the JIRA ticket.
As you can we are specifying a custom value for the Reporter field and adding the results of the previous JIRA lookup step.
Additionally, we are inserting the Message User Real Name and Message Text and inserting them into the generated ticket.
That’s it. Make sure to enable the Zap and you’re all set.
If you’d like to trigger another reaction in another channel, just go ahead and clone that Zap and use it as an image for other Zaps.
In our case we setup another cloned Zap to create a different type of issue in JIRA based on the emoticon.
Exclamation ❗️ = incident
JIRA = standard support request
Hope this has helped add some value in one of your environments in one way or another. It has for mine.
Cheers 🍻