Automations running despite not having a trigger

Question

The automations are making some changes on the board despite something not meeting certain criteria or the trigger happening. It is completely random and is messing with tasks from 1+ years ago. Does anyone know why this may be happening or how to fix it? For example, on one of our boards, I have the automation only run if it has the label "onboarding," but it is changing due dates on other tasks without the label.

Another example is that it randomly updated a task description, but the trigger I have for that is the epic needs to be updated and then the task will copy the description from the epic. However, on the task that the automations changed the description, no one had updated it in about 11 months.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

A rule execution with a status of "No Actions Performed" was at least triggered and the details in the log should tell the issue key(s) that triggered the rule. Have you looked at the details of those logs?

How have you discerned that Automation Rules might be the culprit? Do you see entries in the issue history where Automation for Jira is the actor?

Could the changes be happening due to integration with an external product?

Abbi Littrell · Answer

Hi! Thanks @Trudy P Claspill The strange thing is, when I go to that time frame, everything says "NO ACTIONS PERFORMED." So I can't even locate where the automation ran.

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @Abbi Littrell

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

It is unlikely that an Automation would randomly execute or that it would make updates that do not align with the details of the rule.

If an Automation is executing against issues it should be noted in the Automations panel in the issue.

You may need to click the Refresh button in that panel to display the latest automations.

Does that panel show any rules having been executed?

You can also look in the global Audit Log to see rules that have recently executed and drill into the details to find which rules are acting against specific issues.

https://<your Base URL>/jira/settings/automation#/tab/audit-log

I would recommend finding the Audit Logs to find the ones that document they are acting against the affected issues. Once you find one of those logs, if you can provide a copy of the log here and screen images showing the full details of the related rule and each rule step, then we might be able to help debug the problem.