Jira Tips and Tricks Collection: Finding Specific Automation Flows

[#1]

Tip Relates To

Application Type	Jira, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and more
Deployment Type	Cloud, Data Center
Audience	Application Administrators, Space Administrators
Category	Automation, Documentation

Tip

You know there's an automation flow that does X or includes variable Y but there are hundreds of flows! How do you find the one you're looking for?

Option 1: Comb though individual steps in each flow. (Yuck!)

Option 2: Export flows in JSON format and search the code for keywords. (Better!)

Option 3: Document the relevant parts of flows so you can search for keywords later. (Best!)

Here's how I document automation rules in Confluence so I can search and understand them later.

Example flow documentation

Explanation

Let's say you're looking for a flow but all you remember about it is that a user's name is hard coded in one of the steps. If you've documented your rules, you could do a simple keyword search for the phrase "hard coded" (highlighted below), the user's name (highlighted below), or the user's ID (pictured at the bottom of the previous screenshot.) The documentation page containing that information is returned in seconds and there's no need to hunt through flow settings.

PS: It's not too late to document existing flows - so get to it!

Note: Automation flows were previously called automation rules. The individual parts of a flow, previously called components, and now called steps. Read more

Resources

• Export Jira automation flows to a JSON file – https://support.atlassian.com/cloud-automation/docs/import-and-export-jira-automation-rules

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Back to intro and tip list

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Rachel Wright 

Thanks for your article series.  Yes, and...for this one...

My hope is one day Atlassian will improve / expand the features of the REST API endpoints for automation rules and add webhooks for rule events.  For example, adding:

• a "get all rules with details" endpoint
• a "get component codes to human-friendly names" endpoint for all possible steps 
• endpoint query parameters to search rules by referenced fields (e.g., steps, JQL, etc.)
• etc.

With those, admins could build automated documentation of rules onto Confluence pages, instrument rule health info for dashboards / measures, and lots of other better rule management practices.  Until then, documentation is a laborious process and perhaps requires customers building their own external tools to help.  (I tried building both a rule-documenting-rule with the endpoints and a VS Code extension a few years ago, but paused the efforts due the amount of rule action churn and the apparent altering of how the engine processes some of component parent / child behaviors internally.)

Kind regards,
Bill

[Rachel Wright]

Howdy @Bill Sheboy , thanks for commenting! While we're wishing for things, I'd love it if automation supported admin actions too. For example, find a user who hasn't logged in in X days and make their account inactive. Or alert me when a new custom field is added. (I know there are apps that can do this.)

This post is about documenting and searching automation rules, but I do the same exact thing for all of my workflows too. With the new workflow editor officially launching soon, the ability to export doesn't seem to be an option, which makes the documentation even more important.

Manual documentation is annoying, but I'd rather take the time and have it than not have it. Maybe Rovo will save us from this one day? ;)

Take care!

Rachel
Author, Jira Strategy Admin Workbook

[Matt Doar]

This is a useful article, thank you. And I agree about how useful automation could be with more support for admin tasks. That said, there are apps such as ScriptRunner than can run more general scripts from automations and do more with the admin REST APIs. Disclaimer: I work for Adaptavist who sell ScriptRunner.

[Savannah Ehrhardt]

I have a Claude skill doing this now. Since we can't access automation rules via the MCP, I export all our rules about every 2 weeks (takes ~2 minutes) and have Claude pull the file from my downloads, look for updates in the specific rule set I want documented, and make changes in Confluence (the skill execution takes about 15 minutes, largely unattended). I'm using a page for each rule, with a Page Properties macro to summarize.

The result is something users can reference and request changes to with comments, and I can see the requests in the Page Properties top level report using the Unresolved comments column. It's something that would have been an unmanageable amount of overhead otherwise, and replaces painful Google Docs-based change requests to complicated rules.

[Rachel Wright]

@Savannah Ehrhardt - you're such a hero! This is wonderful. Thanks for sharing and inspiring everyone with great ways to "automate the automation"!

[Rick Westbrock]

@Savannah Ehrhardt any chance you could share your Claude skill? I have just started writing skills for various use cases and would love to see what you came up with. Kudos for making Claude do the tedious work of updating Confluence in addition to doing the analysis.

[Savannah Ehrhardt]

@Rick Westbrock It's really specific to the format of the automation rules I'm documenting, so I'm not sure how reusable it would be. It was very easy to write though - I created a parent Confluence page and two children in the format I wanted, fed it the rules that corresponded, and then had it build the skill off of that and refine itself over time (e.g. managing last updated logic).

[Rick Westbrock]

Ah perfect, have it write its own skill!