Automatically assigning Jira tickets to agents in different time zones

Question

I have a problem, I set up an automation in Jira that assigns tickets to the agents of a project with a balanced workload. The problem is that I have several time zones and if they upload a ticket at 9:00 in the morning in Argentina, the same as if the agents who are in Guatemala there are at 7 in the morning if they have a lower workload, it will be assigned to them, but that is not the idea. The correct thing would be that those agents are not assigned tickets until it is 9:00. How could I do this with JIRA, is it possible?

Josh · Answer

@Julio Rosa I concur with Tuncay's response; this is not an OOTB feature.

If you're not able to purchase a paid plugin, it *may* be possible to leverage Assets and automation to build a custom solution. For example, you could have asset objects representing each assignable agent with an attribute related to the timezone they support. Automation could then perform a lookup of available agents in that timezone when a ticket is generated. (Yadda yadda yadda ... additional automation steps... and voila an appropriate agent is assigned the ticket.)

It would *not* be a simple, quick, or pain-free solution but it might just be crazy enough to work.

Tuncay Senturk _Snapbytes_ · Answer

Hi @Julio Rosa

Unfortunately, Jira Cloud doesn't support time zone–based assignment restrictions out of the box. You can technically implement it using Automation rules, but doing so would require a lot of hardcoded configurations—one for each time zone, with scheduled rules and conditional logic per agent-which is too complex and hard to maintain.

If you're open to using a free Marketplace app, I recommend SnapAssign. It’s built specifically to handle smart assignment scenarios like this—including support for shift-based rules and workload balancing.

It's free, and I'm one of the folks behind the app—so feel free to ask if you have any questions or need help getting started!