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08-18-2025 10:43 AM
Hi everybody
what is the difference between
and
regards
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08-18-2025 10:23 PM
Hey,
so these are both part of the JIRA spoke for the integration hub, but they are used in different purposes. The key difference is in their nature. One is for triggers, the other one is a bi-directional webhook for exchanging event info. For bi-directional integrations and more complex flows, you may need both.
Let's check how a trigger is used & works (as this is the simpler one of the two):
When you have an end-to-end process where both JIRA & ServiceNow are involved, some actions in ServiceNow should trigger some action in JIRA. Triggers allow you to do that without the need of full bi-directionality. They work around an asynchronous concept.
In this example, JIRA would be you primary system. Some type of Jira task is forwarded to a team, which works in ServiceNow exclusively. This triggers a flow in ServiceNow to generate a task for that team. The team adds their comments in ServiceNow, but you need these comments to appear in Jira as well. Therefore, you integrate through the trigger functionality. Within ServiceNow, when a comment is added, this adds to the trigger. The configured webhook is then used by Jira, to see if anything new happened. If the trigger was "triggered", you can then continue your flow in Jira to retrieve the comment from ServiceNow and thus synchronize the whole interaction between the Jira task & the ServiceNow task.
The advantage in this case is, that all your business logic stays mostly within Jira. However, you may also run into issues as the trigger interaction is only running as a pull (Jira pulls all data from ServiceNow).
Now the overall alternative to that is true bi-directionality (your other link). Instead of just adding triggers and waiting for Jira to grab the new comment, you could also setup a flow and trigger the webhook in Jira to update the Jira task. If the team adds a comment to the ServiceNow task, this will the PUSH the comment to the Jira task. At the same time, any update from Jira may be pushed from Jira towards ServiceNow. This is "true" bi-directionality as it pushes updates between the systems (which may cause complexity). Callback Webhooks - in very simple terms - common synchronization issues.
This all is a over-simplification! But the difference comes down to how you want the interaction between ServiceNow & Jira to go. In either case - and this is where it might be confusing - the setup process is almost the same. In both cases you will add webhooks in Jira (either to grab triggers, or to enable bi-directionality). In both cases the setup of the webhooks will be the same. BUT they work differently because of what they do:
The first one is a trigger to make sure that Jira can PULL updates once they happened.
The second one PUSHes updates once they happen to Jira.
In short: Triggers allow for simple PULL only interactions where the business logic remains within Jira (useful for straight forward & low-complexity use cases). Bi-directionality allow complex use-cases to be established, where automation between ServiceNow & Jira is shared (e.g. change approval in ServiceNow & Jira Task planning in Jira).
Hope this helps.
Regards
Fabian
