How are steps calculated?

Question

I'm having a lot of issues with the new "Automation Steps" limits taking effect in December. For one, my team is going from 35 Million automations with Customer Services Management Premium to 350,000. That should still be enough, but such a huge, crazy cut without a price reduction from Atlassian. It's crazy.

Second, the steps calculation is seemingly way off!

Our usage is not too much. Sometimes Jira gets as high as 80% by the end of the month, but that still sub 1700 runs.

Our most active automation is a single step. With most automations being a less than five steps. There are a few automations that are up to 10 steps, by they are sub 500 runs a month. I did the math of our top used automations in a complete month, and it's less than 20k steps. For the whole month.

Yet, according to my step automations I'm using up to 150,000 steps in a single day. That just cannot be.

So I ask, how are steps calculated? Is there something I'm missing?

Tanner Jenkins · Answer

My understanding from Jira's documentation is it only counts if the automation is triggered. Our most common automation is only triggering 3k to 5k a month. I have verified this.

See, our most common automation runs only a single step. If the trigger counts that 2 steps, so at most 10k steps in a given month for that automaton, if that month is particularly busy. And no other automation comes close to that use.

Unless you're telling me the condition on the trigger counts even if the trigger doesn't run. But I can't imagine that's the case because there's no way that I've seen to scope an automation to a particular space. If that is the case, then automations are going to be rendered meaningless. We're a 250+ employee organization with 50 different spaces. I don't see how anyone can feasibly use the automation system if a trigger is counted for every work item created, or comment, or whatever the trigger is.

I also have no visibility on steps used for a particular automation. Just if it's triggered or not. If an automation can burn steps without being triggered and I can't see steps used how am I going to feasibly audit our (around) 50 active automatons?

I also still haven't gotten an answer how I went from 2,275,000,000 steps (35 million automations x 65 steps) to 350,000. That seems very unreasonable.

Brandon Viertel · Answer

Morning @Tanner Jenkins

First, welcome to the community!

A step is each component in the automation that runs. So although you may have 10 steps in an automation, if a conditional stops the automation from running halfway through, half of those steps won't count against usage for your flow.

@Trudy P Claspill provided the doc on that for you. That page also goes over your limits based on your user counts.

For your case, I would look deeper into your automations usage because some of your automations could be using multiple steps for validation and checks in the beginning of the flow that could burn it pretty quick, especially if you're triggering on every single comment and/or work item that gets created.

Can you post a couple screenshots of the flow of your most used automations?

Thanks!

Brandon

Tanner Jenkins · Answer

Yes, I looked at the document. There's no automation that is consuming more than 20 steps, and those automations rarely. Maybe once a month.

According to the estimator I would need at most 229k a month.

It also doesn't explain how I went from 35 million automations to 350 thousand (if all of those were single step). With the 65 step limit, I had 2,275,000,000 steps I could run in a month.