What would make it easier to test and troubleshoot your automations?

[Charlie Gavey]

Hi Community!

Charlie here from the Atlassian Automation product team. We're working on making it easier to test & troubleshoot your automation flows, and we'd love to hear your feedback.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions for how we can make this easier for you, leave a comment below, or book time for a chat with the Automation team here: https://calendly.com/cgavey/automation-feedback?month=2025-12

Thanks,

Charlie

[Chris Rogers]

Hi @Charlie Gavey

A few thoughts:

• Being able to add a comment in an automation rule to explain what a particular section of the rule is meant to do.  Audit log entries work for this today, but feel a bit clunky to use this way; I don't necessarily need to put data in the audit log for review (they're great for that), just explain to anyone looking at the rule "This lookup does this and then we use the value in this way".  Using the audit log action for this also eats up a valuable component
• In Global Automation, being able to filter by issue key and status of an automation run at the same time
• From the Project Automation view, being able to search the audit log by the issue key; Jira Administrators are able to do it from the Global view above but more and more project administrators are asking for tools so they can troubleshoot their automations themselves.
• Filtering options for the Automation -> Recent rule runs section on the issue view.  I think it would be useful to be able to filter out automations that triggered on a particular issue but didn't actually do anything (think signal to noise ratio)

[Stefan Kaufmann]

My upvote especially for 

• Filtering options for the Automation -> Recent rule runs section on the issue view.  I think it would be useful to be able to filter out automations that triggered on a particular issue but didn't actually do anything (think signal to noise ratio)

Right now we just see the last 8 runs from which most runs did not pass the trigger condition. I pretty much like the idea to see automation runs directly on the issue, but the current implementation is pretty much useless and I end up in the audit log search again. 

Also any updates on the entire topic? 

[Bret Jacobsen]

I would like to see a smart value debug action to show all the smart values and their JSON structure/hierarchy.  There are smart values which do not show up in the smart values like {{rule.name}}, for example.

The "magic" that happens behind the scenes actually makes automations more difficult to create and debug.  For example, a log action to show {{issue.Location}} (a single choice select list field) works but when stringing it together with a function like substringBefore, the value is needed as in {{issue.Location.value.substringBefore(" ")}}.

Having the ability to add comments would be very helpful as well.  We use a lot of ingenuity to work around the many limitations of automations and would love to be able to add inline documentation to the automation rather than squeezing it all into the description.

Thank you, Charlie, for starting this topic and soliciting feedback!
Bret

[Daniel Santiago]

Suggestions:

• Comment components in automation rules, like Chris Rogers suggested ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-174 )
• Version control for Automations... I want to revert a failed change in an Automation to a previous version... Confluence already has version control for pages ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-65 )
• Secret storage for API keys ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-1365 )
• Option to enforce serial execution for branches in certain Automations ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-32 )
• Better editing to Multi-select Custom fields in Automation without the need to use JSON ( https://support.atlassian.com/jira/kb/update-values-in-multiuser-picker-field-using-automation-in-jira-cloud/ is just an ugly solution)
• Edit Cascading fields without the need to use JSON ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-131 )
• Option to ignore/hide Automations with "No action performed" in audit log
• Automation to control Forms visibility without using API ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSDCLOUD-12255 )
• Add controls to manage which Automation Components are available ( https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-2102 )
• When adding an Advanced Component in an Automation rule, Jira creates groups and I can't undo that. I need to make a new automation to remove grouping.

[Alan Bruce]

Having a way to search automations for information -> i.e. What automations reference a specific customfield. I had to change a few customfields and remove a few and finding the reference is super painful.

[Evie Z_]

@Alan Bruce 

This topic is now closed as the discussion has become outdated. If you have more questions or want to continue the conversation, feel free to start a new topic. For more details on why we close older threads, check out our Rules of engagement - Atlassian Community .

Thank you for your understanding!

[Todd Thomas]

Using the automation button today for manually triggered automations is convenient, but if you have very many manual triggers that list gets unwieldy very quickly. Being able to have automations grouped/filtered beyond "From workflow" and "From automations" would make it so much easier to see/find specific automations as the list grows for both troubleshooting and from a UX perspective. For example, showing other metadata (description, actions used, etc.) or having some ability to group your manually triggered actions would make it easier to find new rules you're testing.

I know our team has also struggled with a good way to temporarily ignore/comment out logic. Often we would insert some logic, need to remove it, and then add it back again. Being able to change an automation Component to "Ignored" to have it skipped would be so useful.

Similarly useful would be the ability to provide comments on Components to better understand the logic/rationale, including Components that are ignored/skipped.

If automations were code, you could do a simple Find command to search for specific words. In automations, you have to expand specific components to see all of the details. For large/complex automations (especially branching rules), you have to click through most of the Components to find what you're looking for. To have an "Expand all" or a "Code view" option that would make searching/finding specific words/text would save a lot of maintenance and troubleshooting time.

[Alan Bruce]

Here are a couple of things that I know others have talked about:

• Have the ability to save snippets of an automation that will be reused in other Automations
• Have the ability to automate documentation of the rule into Confluence. 
  • Being able to compare rules
• Some sort of 'Preview' of what the rule would do if activated
  • maybe choose a key and then layout what rules would run and what the end result would be
• Fully agree on being able to look up the Automations that did 'execute' on a specific key. Super annoying having to search through Audit logs
• Have the ability to sort the Automations by the Rule Owner. Currently I can only sort by 'all' or 'me'.

[Piyush Annadate _ACE Pune_]

Hello @Charlie Gavey ,
A good initiative to know about Automation feedback.
Seems,  calendly schedule is about in AM timeline, will drop notes here.

- Major:
A view for automation run is shown for top few automation, but that this was part of many other runs, that's no where easy to find.

[Denise Lydia Ellis]

Hi Charlie, some requests below:

• As a Jira administrator, I want a failed/error automation rule to automatically create an incident/work item in a designated project and ability to assign it to the Jira admin team or rule owner, So that failures are tracked, triaged, and resolved promptly instead of relying only on email notifications to a email account.
• As a Org-, Site-, Jira admin, I want the system to warn me if I deactivate a user who is configured as the actor for any automation rules, So that I can prevent rules from failing due to lack of permissions once the user is inactive.
• As a Org-, Site-, Jira admin, I want Jira to warn me when I attempt to deactivate a user who owns one or more automation rules, So that I can review and reassign those rules before completing the deactivation and avoid unexpected rule failures or orphaned ownership.
• As a Org-, Site-, Jira admin, I want Jira to warn me if a user is configured as a recipient for automation failure notifications, So that I can redirect those alerts to an active mailbox or group and ensure failures are still monitored.
• As a Jira administrator, I want a consolidated impact panel when deactivating a user, So that I can see all automation-related dependencies in one place before confirming/committing deactivation.

[Piyush Annadate _ACE Pune_]

- Ticket about the failure is a good use case.
- If automation can have an event endpoint- would be good.