My First Forge App: Creating Jira Tickets on Workflow Updates Using Audit Logs

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Introduction:

Not a very fancy app but more of a learning effort.

As a Jira admin, I’ve always wanted tighter governance around workflow changes - especially in large instances where silent edits can disrupt projects without traceability. So, I took the plunge into Atlassian Forge and built my very first Forge app!

This app listens for workflow update events via Audit Logs and automatically creates a Jira ticket to record the change, helping teams maintain better control and accountability.

Architecture:

Here's the architecture behind this app, designed to be lightweight, proactive, and fully serverless using Atlassian Forge:

Components Explained:

• Audit Log API Polling: Periodically scans audit logs using a Forge scheduled trigger.

• Event Parsing Logic: Filters for workflow changes and extracts who made the change, when, and what was changed.

• Duplicate Prevention: Ensures the same audit log isn’t processed multiple times.

• Ticket Creation Module: Creates an issue in a designated governance project and assigns it to the user who performed the change.

Why This App Matters:

Imagine someone silently tweaks a production workflow - removes a validator or alters a condition. Normally, this goes unnoticed. With this app:

• A Jira issue is created automatically.

• The person who made the change is identified and assigned the ticket.

• The change gets tracked and can be reviewed or rolled back.

Power of Audit Logs:

What makes this app powerful is its use of Audit Logs, an often-overlooked feature in Jira Cloud. Beyond workflow changes, this opens doors for tracking and reacting to:

Event Type	Potential Automation
Permission Scheme Updated	Alert the security team
User/Group Changes	Sync with Confluence permissions
Project Created	Auto-initiate configuration checklist
Custom Field Deleted	Warn of field usage and data loss

Future Potential:

This app is just a start. It can evolve to:

• Send alerts to Slack/Teams.

• Document changes in Confluence automatically.

• Enforce change approvals before rollout.

• Create dashboards for visualizing workflow changes.

• Detect risky patterns like repeated validator removals.

Built With:

• Forge Platform

• Scheduled Triggers

• Jira REST API

• Audit Log API

• @Forge/api, @Forge/ui, @Forge/bridge

Why I Built It:

This was my first Forge app, very basic one and I built it to solve a real-world governance challenge I faced as a Jira admin. I wanted a way to automate transparency around changes that could otherwise go unnoticed.

I'm excited to improve this further.

Let's Collaborate:

If you’re a fellow Jira admin looking to bring proactive governance into your instance, drop your thoughts, suggestions, or forge ideas.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks for this article @Akhand Pratap Singh 

Firstly, Well done on your 1st Forge app. A great milestone! And plus it aims to solve or guide a solution to a big real world problem!

Is this something that you can share at all for us to install and play with?

The 1st Forge app I developed was a dashboard gadget that creates tables and graphs for vulnerability tickets and custom number field calculations - this was in Jan Feb this year. We have not evolved it much unfortunately but would love to dive into it deeper.

What tips do you have? I know for sure that I was and still am a bit overwhelmed by the need to learn Javascript and React for Forge apps. We have a custom connect app that does countless more but struggling to find the time and direction to move it to our Forge app.