AD user in Jira has strange userkey JIRAUSER46614

Salvijus Laucius

Hi,

Our Jira SD (v4.4.2) users are synchronized from Active Directory. For most of them key, name and username values are the same. For example: 

jira.user=cccccc(cccccc) key=cccccc name=cccccc usrName=cccccc dispName=CCCC DDDD

But some of them have a weird key:

jira.user=aaaaaa(JIRAUSER46614) key=JIRAUSER46614 name=aaaaaa usrName=aaaaaa dispName=AAAA BBBBB

What does it mean? Is this an synchronization issue?

 

Andy Heinzer

Hi Salvijus,

I understand that you have several users within Jira whose userkeys match their usernames, but some more recently created users have what appear to be completely random userkeys.  This is not a bug, nor is this a synchronization issue.

Instead this is a change that was made to Jira 8.2 (and Jira Service Desk 4.2) versions and higher in response to GDPR changes in Jira. All versions of Jira server 6.0 and higher have userkeys values for all users.  Historically this userkey value was made to match the username when the account was first created.  Starting in Jira 6 user accounts could be renamed, hence the need of the userkey field in order to keep historical tracking accurate.

However any newly created users in Jira 8.2 or higher will instead use this different format for their userkey when their account is first created.  From that document:

We’re changing this approach so that all user keys for new users (no changes for existing users) have the following format: JIRAUSER10100.

I hope this helps to explain the change in behavior here.

Andy