Jira REST API doesn't have “ticket deleted” info — so how to measure this?

[Chris Lenzini]

When an issue is deleted in Jira, there is no notification of any kind in the incremental Jira API.

So for something simple like "Full Lead Time" or "Full Solve Time" -- those metrics can be mucked up because a "deleted ticket" will be "open" until the Sun burns out -- AND there's no way of knowing it's deleted. It just goes "poof". From a data perspective, it looks like all the other open tickets with no actions happening.

Is there an efficient work around for this? My thoughts so far.

1. Direct Jira SQL access. Pull a full list of Issue IDs in Jira. Do an inner join/ filter against this list. The deleted tickets are tickets that are "gone" from the fully refreshed list.

2. Do a full cycle, 1000 issues at a time, of Issue IDs every night in Jira via the REST API. Basically the same as 1, but wildly inefficient for merely finding what tickets are deleted. It defeats the purpose of incremental data pulling, somewhat.

3. I vaguely heard of some kind of "delete listener" -- I'm unsure what that is. Would it work for every project? There may be some work-around where you can find "deleted work-flows" everyday and link those to deleted issues. Anyone know about this?

Obviously this is a massive flaw in the JIRA API that many other ticketing software (like Zendesk) actually get right and puts a 'deleted' in the event and ticket meta-data. But is there a common sense way to work with the big "delete problem" in Jira?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yes, the common-sense way to do it is not allowing delete.  Because the issues simply go, if you need any of the data, you're stuffed.

I do agree this is a weakness in many ways, but on the other hand, if you're deleting at this level, you should be doing it because you really don't want it there, in which case the information in the deleted item should never have been put in in the first place.