Jira Automations Seemingly Broke Overnight

[Ty Foster]

We use Jira automations for our company's IT support needs and it seems to have stopped working as of this evening.  I have no idea why or what the cause of this could be as I made no changes on my end and everything was working flawlessly previous to today.  

Any advice or information that anyone can provide around this topic or why we might be seeing these issues would be greatly appreciated.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Ty Foster -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The rule(s) you show are triggered on Work Item Created, and that trigger (and others) can have intermittent timing problems.  The challenge is the rule can start running before all data is available and the work item is in a stable state.  As your rule worked in the past, it is possible some data is not consistently available for the condition tests.

The mitigation for this is to always add the Re-fetch Work Item Data action immediately after that specific trigger.  This will slow the rule slightly, reloading the data before the remaining steps process.  Perhaps try adding that to see how the behavior is impacted.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Ty Foster]

Hey Bill, 

Thanks so much for the tip!  Does this appear to now be set up in the way it should be based on your understanding?  Apologies for what may be a simple question here as I'm very new to managing Jira automations. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Yes, that is correct.  Please test to learn if that helps the conditions pass when expected.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Ty Foster 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Have you reviewed the execution audit logs for the affected rules?

Have you confirmed that the affected rules are still enabled?

Do the users specified as the Actors for the rules still have permissions in the Jira product?

Have you confirmed that you have not exceeded

What is the symptom of "stopped working"? Are the rules not getting triggered? Are they getting triggered but not producing the results you expect?

Are multiple rules affected?

Has anything else stopped working in your Jira product?

In order to provide additional debugging guidance we would need to start examining the rules that "stopped working". To do that we would need you to provide screen images showing the entirety of a rule that stopped working and the details from the rule execution log (if the rule executed and did not produce the expected results).

[Ty Foster]

Attached are the two automations in question.  The first is for our evening on call support engineer.  As you can see it is set to only operate on Thursdays and Fridays, yet yesterday (on a Wednesday) it was assigning tickets.

The second is the normal working day automation and should have been assigning tickets during that time frame yesterday but wasn't.  I even tested turning off the on call automation to see if the normal working day automation would work but it still didn't.  

Again, this was all working fine until yesterday to my knowledge.

[Trudy Claspill]

Thank you for those screen images.

Can you also provide screen images showing the rule execution audit logs for each of these?

[Ty Foster]

The highlighted row is where the issue began.  The on-call rule should not be touching this issue, but it is.  Additionally, the round robin rule should be assigning it during this time frame, but it's not.  

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello Ty,

Thank you for that additional information. 

You said the On Call rule should not be touching "this issue" but you did not include any information about what issue was touched. Can you provide evidence that the On Call rule acted against an issue that it should not have?

Can you provide a screen image showing the complete rule? Sometimes rules are not operating correctly because of structure or context, but we can't determine that without seeing the entire rule.

Can you expand all the details of one of the audit log records where you believe the rule did something it should not and explain what you think it did and why it should not have done that.

Please do the same for the round-robin rule.

[Ty Foster]

Please see the attached photos of the full rules and expanded audit logs. Let me know if you need any other information.

Please note that for the "if block" for the on-call rule that is linked in the logs is the one shown in the screenshot.

[Nikola Perisic]

Welcome @Ty Foster 

Have you checked the audit logs for you automation rules? Also, check if you have reached the automation rule limits.

[Ty Foster]

Hi there, yes, I found the offending automation, however, it is going outside of the bounds/parameters I have set for it (it’s supposed to only be enabled during late evening hours). Additionally, the other automations that are supposed to be enabled during the early evening were not assigning issues properly. I did notice that the verbiage changed on the automations (again, not something I changed) so I’m curious if that could be a cause.