Why is Jira Automation's logged execution time longer than the actual run time?

Abhilash Reddy Sane

I'm encountering an issue where the reported execution time in the Jira Automation rule logs is significantly longer than the actual time the rule seems to take when observed manually. For instance, a rule that runs in a few seconds appears to log an execution time of over 20secs.

Has anyone else experienced this discrepancy, and are there best practices for accurately measuring automation performance?

I’m trying to update the priority scores for Jira tickets using an automation rule that follows these steps:

1. Check the total backlog count – the rule first retrieves the total number of tickets in the backlog.

2. Check how many tickets meet specific criteria – it filters for a subset of tickets based on certain conditions (e.g., label, status, etc.).

   1. For each ticket, it evaluates whether the total backlog count is greater than 30.

      If the backlog exceeds 30, the rule uses JQL to identify the ticket and updates its priority score with a boost.

   2. If the backlog is 30 or less, the rule still updates the priority score using the same JQL, but without the boost.

The goal is to dynamically adjust ticket priority based on current workload and specific qualifiers.

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Abhilash Reddy Sane and welcome to the Community!

I would rather rely on the reported run time of an automation rule than on what you manually observe.

Automation rules run asynchronously in Jira an may depend on background processes to complete in a consistent state. Not everything that is executed by the rule is also visible in the UI. The Atlassian Platform does consist of a lot of interconnected services that do require background syncing of information that you don't (always) see as a user. I would expect that the automation rule logs log the end of executions as the very last step in the overall process.

Hope this helps!