What's the best way to get the reporter's manager in JSM? Here's what I tried

Cristian Quiroz

Hey everyone! 👋

I recently implemented automatic manager approvals in Jira Service Management and wanted to share my experience — including the good, the bad, and the workarounds. Hopefully this helps someone, and I'd love to hear how you've solved this.

🎯 The Challenge

A very common scenario: a user submits a request in JSM, and their immediate manager needs to approve it. No manual selection — fully automatic.

The problem? JSM doesn't have a native "get my manager" feature. So where do you get that information?

🔌 My Approach: JSM Assets - Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) Beta Integration

Since our organization uses Microsoft Entra ID as the identity source of truth, I decided to use the JSM Assets - Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) Beta Integration to sync user data directly into Atlassian Assets.

📖 Official docs: https://support.atlassian.com/assets/docs/integrate-microsoft-entra-id-and-assets/ 

What it syncs well:

• displayName, department, jobTitle, email among others

• Groups

• The Manager → Employee relationship 

What it doesn't sync:

• The Atlassian accountId — and this is critical if you want to use automation to set approvers

🛠️ Bridging the Gap

Without the accountId, automation rules can't assign the manager as an approver. So I had to solve this separately:

1. Created a custom attribute (accountId) in the Employee object type in Assets

2. Built a script to automatically fetch and populate the accountId for new users synced from Entra ID (With Scriptrunner or Automation with Org API Token, i use Scriptrunner)

3. Bulk-updated all existing users in a one-time regularization

This connected the Entra ID identity with the Atlassian identity inside Assets.

⚙️ The Automation Rule

Once everything was linked, the automation was straightforward:

1. Trigger: Request created

2. Lookup: Find the Asset object where accountId matches the reporter

3. Navigate: From that object, get the linked Manager

4. Extract: Get the Manager's accountId

5. Action: Set the Approvers field

Fully automatic. Zero manual intervention. 

😤 The Biggest Limitation: Manual Sync Only

Here's where the Entra ID Assets Connector falls short in its current beta state:

There is no automatic sync schedule. You can only trigger a sync by manually clicking a button in the admin console.

This means:

• If someone gets a new manager in Entra ID → it won't update in Assets until an admin manually syncs

• It creates an unnecessary dependency on the administrator

• For production environments, this is a significant gap

I really hope Atlassian adds scheduled sync in a future release.

✅ The Result

It works. Approvers are assigned automatically.

Was it plug-and-play? Definitely not. But it delivered exactly what was needed.

💬 Now I want to hear from you:

• How are you solving manager approvals in JSM? Are you using Assets, a marketplace add-on, or something else entirely?

• Have you tried the Entra ID Assets Connector? What's been your experience with it?

• How do you handle the accountId gap? Did you find a cleaner solution?

• Is the manual-only sync a dealbreaker for you? Or have you found a workaround?

Let's compare approaches, I'm sure there are better ways to do this and I'd love to learn from your experience! 🙌

Rune Rasmussen

If you have Atlassian Guard it is possible to also provision the Manager attribute from EntraID.
How to sync the manager attribute into Atlassian Home with Azure AD | Platform experiences | Atlassian Support
That can then be reached with smart values using {{XYZ.manager}}. It is only the UUID of the manager that is available here, but for filling in user-picker fields that is all we need.

This will save you the hassle of manually updating Assets objects, and also save you some Assets objects while you're at it.

For your requests that require approval you could have an automation rule that triggers when a work item is created, slap on whatever conditions you need, and have it set your approver(s) field as {{reporter.manager}}