What happens if agent license is exceeded but my Software license is within limit?

[David Yu]

So I guess I'm one of the rare unicorns that bought an unlimited Agent license back in the days. It was great, I never had to worry about managing licenses or asking users to make silly tickets to gain access as an agent.

With the conversion to Data Center, I now have to work within fixed constraints. I'm creating a ScriptRunner listener to automatically gives users a license whenever they are added to the project role Service Desk Team since I don't want to manually shuffle licenses. I will also have a clean-up rotation job that will rotate out old inactive users.

So I know if I exceed the Jira Software license it goes into some read-only state.

But what happens if I only exceed the Agent license count? Will regular Jira still work? Will my portals still accept tickets?

PS: If anyone is interested in my scriptrunner listener, happy to share it.

[David Yu · Accepted solution]

Response from support:

You are correct, as described in Licensing your Jira applications if you exceed the Jira Software user count, the users won't be able to create new issues.

For Jira Service Management, the behavior is a little different, you won't be able to add any more users than the license count for JSM. You will be able to create users but you won't be able to assign the group that gives the application access with the following error message:

Adding a user to the selected groups will exceed the number of allowed users licensed to Jira Service Management. You need to reduce the number of licensed users, or consider upgrading your user tier.

[David Yu]

To add to this, here's a failure mode to consider. Your are at your JSM agent limit. You reactivate a user that previously has the JSM agent group assigned.

Whoops, now you're over the limit, and none of the JSM features work anymore. :-/

[Jakub Kulaga]

I have recreated the scenario. After sending the invite you get the following error message: 

[Judah]

Do you have a test environment where you can purposely try to create this scenario? 

I'd be interested in seeing your script. At my enterprise size company, our Jira/Confluence licenses are provisioned by another team. I didn't know Jira went into a read only state if you exceed licenses. That is interesting. 

[David Yu]

I can't test it yet because we're currently still testing with the eval license which is unlimited agents. Not having an easy time pasting the script here so here's a link to the snippet.