Automation usage limit reached without actually reaching the monthly limit

Question

I have billing admin access to the cloud instance of Atlassian for my company.

My users have been told they reached their monthly automation usage limit for Jira on the site.

I checked the usage in the Insights console and I see we have used 25k out of the 100k monthly allowance for September (80k for Jira).

The usage limit notification appears to be wrong.

Can anybody explain this?

Josh · Answer

A useful next check is to compare the affected site's Settings → System → Global Automation → Usage view with Administration → Insights → Platform usage for the same reporting window. Also inspect the global audit log for the exact failure text; “monthly rule executions exceeded” and “THROTTLED” point to different limits. If the site-level meter is the one at capacity, temporarily identifying the highest-volume rules and narrowing any Global-scope rules to the required projects is safer than disabling automation broadly.

Dylan Fletcher · Answer

One more place to look: that 25k/100k figure is pooled across the whole org, but the warning your users saw is per site. If you have more than one Jira site in the org, the site where the message appeared may have hit its own rule-execution quota even though the org number looks fine. The per-site usage page Sami mentioned will confirm which site actually fired it.

Sami Shaik · Answer

@Stephen Beacom AzT ,

Matthew has pointed you at the right page and @KP has the right question (which limit, which unit), so let me put the two things together, because your numbers are consistent with each other once you know they measure different things.

1. The notification and the console are two different meters. The 25k of 100k you read in Atlassian Administration → Insights → Platform usage is the new organisation-pooled step allowance, the one that starts billing on 3 December (how usage is calculated). The message your users saw, "reached your monthly automation usage limit for Jira," is the wording of the older per-site, per-product rule-execution model, which still exists in Jira itself at Settings → System → Global Automation → Usage (Matthew's page). One counts steps at the org level; the other counts runs at the site level, per product. Both are live during the transition, which is why a site can be at 25 percent on one and at 100 percent on the other with nobody lying.

2. Why the run-limit meter can fire when it should not. Atlassian documents one specific cause for exactly your symptom, the error with usage still under the threshold: a rule with Global scope checks for a valid licence on every product on the site, and if a product has been removed (JSM removed from a site that still has global rules, in Atlassian's example), the check fails and Jira reports it as the monthly execution limit being exceeded (monthly limit reached but usage below the limit). The fixes in that KB: disable global rules you no longer use, and change the rest from Global to Multiple projects scope.

3. How to confirm which one you hit, in ten minutes.

* Open the global audit log (Settings → System → Global Automation → Audit log) and find a failed run from a user who got the notification. Read the exact error text: "Monthly rule executions have been exceeded" is the legacy meter; a THROTTLED entry is a service limit, a separate thing again (service limits versus usage limits).
* On the Usage tab, check which product the count is against and whether any product shown there is no longer licensed on the site.
* List your Global-scope rules. If any exist and a product has ever been removed from that site, you have the KB's case.

If it is the licence artefact, rescoping the global rules stops it the same day. If the audit log shows a genuine execution count at the cap, Matthew is right that it will not clear until the reset, and the support ticket should carry both screenshots, the Usage tab and the Platform usage page, so Support sees the same mismatch you do.