How are you managing Atlassian Automation rule sprawl across multiple Jira instances?

Question

Hi all — looking for war stories from anyone running Jira Cloud at scale.

Over the last year I've seen a few orgs hit the same wall with Atlassian Automation. Curious whether this matches what you're seeing, or whether I'm looking at edge cases.

The pattern, roughly:

* Org has 3-10 Jira instances (acquisitions, regional splits, JSM separated from Software, sandbox + prod)
* Each instance accumulates 50-300 Automation rules over time
* Nobody knows which rules exist, who owns them, when they last fired, or whether they overlap with rules in another instance
* A rule breaks silently → someone notices weeks later when a workflow stops behaving
* Someone needs to migrate a rule from staging to prod → there's no proper diff, just hope and the audit log
* Compliance asks "show me all rules that touch customer PII" → someone exports JSON and grep-s it

A few specific questions:

* How are you currently auditing your Automation rules? Spreadsheet? Confluence page that's already stale? An app I haven't found?
* How do you migrate rules between instances? The new public REST APIs help but they're not a workflow. Are you scripting it, manually re-creating, or shipping rules via Forge?
* Do you version your rules? Git? Confluence history? Just hope?
* When a rule breaks, how do you know? Is there an actual alerting story, or is it incident-driven?
* Has anyone tried building this in-house? I'm aware Adaptavist has bits of this, ScriptRunner can audit some of it, and there are a couple of governance apps for older Jira features — but I haven't found anything Cloud-native that treats rules as a managed asset.

I'm asking because I'm thinking about building tooling for this and want to know whether I'm solving a real problem or imagining one. Honest "we just don't have this problem" replies are as useful as the war stories.

[link and CTA removed]

Thanks.

Lluis Gasso · Answer

Thanks @Evgenii — really appreciate the concrete answer. The REST API + Git approach is along the lines of what I've been seeing work, and the point on built-in alerting being "enough" is fair pushback worth sitting with.

@Lukasz Modzelewski — understood on the links, thanks for the cleanup, my mistake.

@Bill Sheboy — fair flag to raise, and I get why the pattern looks suspicious. To be transparent: I'm trying to understand whether the pain I keep hearing about is real or anecdotal before deciding whether it's worth building anything. Happy to keep the conversation here in the thread rather than off-platform, and happy for mods to move it if App Central is the better home.

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Greetings, community managers and moderators!

I have noted several questions like this which are solicitations for information to create commercial products.  (i.e., market research)  The indicators are often a new user offering a survey link, prompt such as "I am thinking about building a marketplace app...", paid / reward offers, etc.  This specific topic on rule management has been raised multiple times in the community...and thus the info is already present.

What is the guidance here?  Should stuff like this be moved to App Central?

Thanks, and kind regards,
Bill

Lukasz Modzelewski · Answer

(nope, @Lluis Gasso links are not allowed - removed)