Can a service account be used as an actor in Automation rules?

[Damien DELIGNIERES]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently trying to use a service account (recently introduced by Atlassian) as the actor in some of our Jira Service Management automation rules.

The account has:

• A JSM agent license

• Access to the relevant project(s)

However, it doesn't appear in the list of available actors when editing an automation rule.

I understand from the documentation and community discussions that the account might only become visible after performing an action (e.g., commenting, transitioning an issue).
But since this is a service account, it has no password and cannot log in interactively — so it's impossible to manually trigger such an action.

Is there any workaround or official way to enable a service account to be recognized as an automation actor? Or are service accounts currently not supported for this use case?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Yoann LEGRAND · Accepted solution]

Hi @Damien DELIGNIERES , 

I actually reached out to Atlassian support regarding this limitation, and they confirmed that service accounts cannot currently be selected as automation rule actors. They also created a feature request to address this use case: AUTO-2008.
If anyone else is impacted, I’d recommend voting and watching that ticket to help raise visibility

[Damien DELIGNIERES]

Thank you Yoann

[Nikola Perisic · Accepted solution]

Welcome @Damien DELIGNIERES 

I've just tested this out now and no, you cannot add a service account as an actor in the automation rule. However, you can add them to the project.

[Damien DELIGNIERES]

Thank you Nikola

[Jan Stähle]

Implementing this feature would be greatly appreciated - it would elegantly eliminate the current arrangement in which the gardener must be entrusted with the keys to the royal vault in order to mow the lawn.

[Jeremy Wood]

I stumbled upon this post and i am curious what would be the use case for having a service account run an automaton instead of the actor just being "Automation for Jira"? 

[Jamie Spatz]

For us, we'd like to be able to comment at customers from something that feels less like automation but is actually automated.