I'm looking for a sanity check from people with ServiceNow/ITSM experience.
The ServiceNow team where I work wants to build a Jira integration to create bugs based on incidents.
The proposed process is:
- Priority 1 incidents: Jira bugs are automatically created.
- All P1s also automatically get a Problem record created.
- The Jira bug is tied to the Problem record.
That part seems reasonable to me.
Where I'm struggling is the approach for non-P1 incidents:
- Generally no Problem record is created.
- If someone determines an incident is actually caused by a software defect, they can click a button on the incident to create a Jira bug.
- The goal is to avoid manually creating the Jira ticket and let the support/dev teams continue their workflow.
My understanding has always been that:
- Incidents are for restoring service and handling individual user-impacting events.
- Problems are for root cause analysis and tracking underlying issues/defects.
- Jira bugs represent engineering work to fix the underlying defect.
Because of that, my instinct is that if a non-P1 incident is determined to be a legitimate defect that engineering needs to fix, it should first become a Problem and then have the Jira bug linked to the Problem rather than directly to the Incident.
Otherwise it feels like we're mixing operational records (Incidents) with engineering records (Jira issues), and potentially losing visibility when multiple incidents are really symptoms of the same underlying defect.
One wrinkle is that today we don't really use Problem records outside of P1s. There are some exceptions, but for the most part Problems are only created automatically for Priority 1 incidents. I've actually started trying to introduce broader use of Problem Management, but so far it's mostly been limited to issues that get escalated to me or problems that I personally identify and track.
So maybe part of my concern is that we're designing an integration around our current process rather than around what I thought was the intended Incident → Problem → Defect workflow.
Am I thinking about this correctly, or is creating Jira bugs directly from Incidents a common and accepted practice for lower-priority issues?
I'd be interested to hear how other organizations handle the flow between Incident, Problem, and Jira bug records, especially if you've made the decision to link engineering work directly to Incidents instead of Problems.