How to send a slack DM if an issue sits in a status too long

[Mara Julin]

Our team is noticing that our tickets are sitting in the QA status for a long time. Ideally we'd love to send a Slack DM to whoever is "assigned" to the ticket if the ticket is in the QA status past 48 hours (to remind them that we are waiting on their QA).

Is there a way to have this level of customization? I've seen options for when statuses are moved, etc; but not triggering after a certain amount of time and to send a message to a specific person.

Help!

[Steven Tonge]

To send a message to the Assignee in a Slack message, you can use the following in the "Channel or User" field in Send Slack Message in Jira automation:

@{{issue.Asignee.emailAddress.substringBefore("@")}}

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi @Mara Julin,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

You can do this with automation, but in order to send a DM you would need the Slack ID for the assignee. Instead of using DM you could use a channel and use @ mentions instead, that is how we do it to notify PMs when we have new customer escalations for example.

We do DMs as well, but we have to use an iPaaS tool to do that, in our case we use tray.io for it. The workflow is that the automation triggers a web hook to tray.io and we send over the the user's email address. Then in tray we look up the user in Slack and then send a DM to them. 

[Mara Julin]

Thank you! where do I set up the automation? I'm only seeing options like "trigger when status is moved" but this doesn't work with my case since i want to trigger it when status hasn't been moved after X time.

[Mikael Sandberg]

You can use the scheduled trigger to do this. Here us an example from the automation library:

[Daniel Eads]

As an add-on to the answer about DMs, there is a script you can run that will get the Slack UIDs and store them in a user property that Automation can access. Details here: Mention someone directly in Slack via Jira Automation 

[Robert DelFave]

@Mikael Sandberg any idea what the automation would look like if I want to ping a Slack channel if issues have been sitting open for a certain amount of hours?

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Robert DelFave It would look similar to the one I posted above, just remove the transition part and use the "Send Slack message" action instead of the add comment one. In order to send a Slack message you need to have an incoming webhook in Slack, and you can easily create one by following their instructions here.

[Robert DelFave]

@Mikael Sandberg any chance you could help me out here? I have the automation built but I don't believe it's actually set to do what I want.

What I am looking to do is set the automation to ping the specific Slack channel when issues in the filter have been sitting for X amount of time. 

[Mikael Sandberg]

You are correct, the JQL needs to be changed. It should look something like this:

"Request Type" = Email(MWTR) status = "QA" and updated < -48h

This should give you all Email request type in the QA status that have not been updated in the past 48 hours.