I created a working automation that makes new Airtable rows whenever specific Jira tickets get created. That part works fine.
Now I’m trying to build another zap that updates the Airtable row when someone changes the Jira ticket status. My current setup looks like this:
Trigger: Jira ticket updated
Action 1: Search for Airtable row
Action 2: Update the found row
The problem is the search step keeps failing. It can’t locate the right Airtable row that matches the Jira ticket. Has anyone dealt with this before? What am I missing in my configuration?
Had the exact same issue when syncing our PM tools last year. Your search action is probably being too picky about matching data.
First - check if you’re doing exact matches on fields with different formatting. Like if Jira sends “In Progress” but Airtable has “In-Progress”, it won’t find anything.
Add a filter to your Jira trigger so it only fires for tickets that already exist in Airtable. Stops the zap from running on tickets that were never synced.
Set your search to “Should Continue? = yes”. When the search fails, the zap keeps going instead of dying. Then add a condition after the search to only update if it actually found a row.
Also - check if your Airtable view has filters. Zapier respects view filters, so if your tickets get filtered out, the search won’t see them even though they’re in the table.
Had this exact issue a few months back and it drove me crazy for days. The problem’s usually field mapping in the search step. Use a unique identifier that exists in both systems - I’d go with the Jira ticket key or ID as a dedicated field in your Airtable base. Don’t search by ticket title or description since formatting differences will mess things up. Also check that your first zap’s actually populating that identifier field when it creates the initial row. Verify the exact field names in Airtable too - they’re case sensitive and extra spaces break the search. Test your search step manually with a known ticket ID to see what error you get - that’ll point you in the right direction.
check ur airtable field types - if u r searching a number field but jir’as sending text, they won’t match. also verify the jira trigger fires on status changes specifically, not just any update. webhooks can be flaky n miss triggers sometimes.