Best practice for sending Automation rule failure notifications to multiple admins

[nagata shumpei]

Hi community,

I’m currently reviewing how to manage Automation rule failure notifications in Jira Cloud.

Background

・We have multiple Jira administrators
・We want all admins to be notified when an Automation rule fails

Challenge

・Each Automation rule can only have a single owner

・Failure notifications are sent only to that owner

Idea we are considering

We are մտածing about：

• Creating a dedicated account using a mailing list address (e.g., jira-admin@xxx.com)
• Assigning this account as the Automation rule owner
• So that failure notifications are distributed to multiple admins via the mailing list

Concerns

• Is using a distribution list / shared account as an Automation owner supported or recommended?
• Are there any known issues with email delivery (e.g., spam filtering, unreliable distribution)?
• Are there any audit or governance concerns with this approach?

Question

For those managing Automation at scale, how do you handle failure notifications for multiple admins?

• What is the recommended or best practice approach?
• Are you using shared accounts, email forwarding, or explicit notification actions within rules?
• Any pitfalls or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance!

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

You can definitely create a dedicated account that is using a distribution list/shared account email address, there is nothing in automations or Atlassian that prevent this. That is how we currently do it, and how I have done it in the past.

The downside is that depending on the number of automation failures, your admins could get notification fatigue, but you could always choose to filter your emails. Another option would be to use an account who's email address forwards it to a JSM project if you want to make sure that an alert is taken care of. This option would scale better and you could then make sure that no failure notification is missed.

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @nagata shumpei 

Yes, and...to the suggestions from @Mikael Sandberg 

I recommend watching this suggestion in the JAC backlog to add REST API endpoints, and perhaps events, for audit logs and rule problems.  Once those are in place, one could build monitoring to consolidate rule failure notifications without the side effects caused by changing rule owners (i.e., permissions problems).

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/AUTO-51

Kind regards,
Bill