Automation limits too restrictive

Question

Getting thoughts from other power users out there about the automation limits.

We are in the software dev industry so naturally we want to automate things as much as possible. We are on the standard plan at 1,700 execution a month (Nov '23 numbers) and we are struggling to not exceed the monthly limit. When we hit the limit, things do not go well as those executions are huge time savers for us.

The financial jump from standard to premium, almost doubling the license cost (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing) just doesn't make sense.

Is anyone else easily hitting these limits?

Vlad Mo · Answer

Is it 1700 per single automation rules, or for all of them, I have 20 of them for multiple projects

Ryan Cauldwell · Answer

Couldn't agree with Rafael more, except I'd say it's a bullet in the head not the foot.

As a startup, we specifically went for tools/softwares that allowed high levels of automation and processing to minimize the amount of overhead per person, allowing us to scale the software use without needing to scale human resources as quickly.

Jira is used extensively across our business from Support to Engineering. With the implementation of these automation limits however, and the unreasonable price jump to get any real usage limits on automation, it's likely we'll be moving away from Jira in the new year.

The process of looking for alternatives has already started. 
Sad that the value of the tool is undermined by a tiny tweak to it's use-ability, just so that the company could make more money.

David Nickell · Answer

I haven't done much with the built in automation;  with that disclaimer in mind, the REST API exposes (IMHO) every object you need to automate in and outside of Jira.  As you mentioned you are a software shop, put together something like this:

* Set up a filter in Jira that identifies the automation candidates. Can be as simple as all tickets updated in the last 30 minutes.  But you probably also want some sort of "automation complete" flag that gets set to "FALSE" in your workflow.
* Run a timed script at the appropriate intervals (30 minutes in this example) to extract the filter results through the API
* Act on each ticket -- whether that is build new tickets from it, send a notification to an outside software app, etc.
* Update the ticket automation flag to "TRUE".

Hope this helps