How to track Field Configuration Changes

[Ricky Lin]

Long story short, we somehow had 4 fields made required across nearly all existing field configurations within JIRA recently while I was out of the office (what a timing!) and I have no way to really tell who did this and how it happened.

We're running on JIRA 7.4.2 and the Audit Log doesn't seem to track that level of changes.  My questions are:

1) How can you track these kind of changes?
2) Because this change seems to have impacted all existing field configurations, what could be a possible reason that this happened?  I'm thinking more on the server/DB end as I doubt an admin would just go through all the field configurations and made these fields required...

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

I use a change control process to make ALL changes in JIRA. I know this won't help for what just happened, but I would hope you don't have too many people that can do that to ask. I use a project with tasks like change a select list, add a custom field, add a field to a screen, create a project, etc. 

[Ricky Lin]

Hello Joe.  Appreciate the feedback!  So i generally ask for a ticket for any JIRA Customization requests to have a good idea of the scope of the request and who it came from...  Unfortunately, this had to happen while I was away and I had to use my phone to make some emergency changes on the fly :( 

Wishing these levels of changes could be configurable to be tracked somehow as mismanagement could be very crippling.

[Joe Pitt]

I agree. I started in an IBM mainframe environment where everything was tracked. When I came to the server/web side I found out there isn't much tracking going on even if you're in audit mode compared to what I was used to.  If you just have a limited number of people that can make the change and none of them will own up you have an integrity problem.  

[Ricky Lin]

Hi Joe!  Just wanted to thank you for sharing your input and feedback :)  A follow up that we ended up installing Auditor for JIRA (https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/43203/auditor-for-jira?hosting=server&tab=overview), which actually logs this kind of change in their Comprehensive audit log.  

We'll be looking to upgrade to JIRA 7.9.2 (latest at the moment) to see if their Improved Audit log actually tracks more changes now.

[Joe Pitt]

I didn't know that existed. the fact you have to pay for it, to me, indicates it will probably be around long term and updated. I've seen several free plugins folks relied on that stopped being updated for newer versions of JIRA