How can we troubleshoot an issue transition and history entry that has a blank user name/id ? "made changes" with no username.

Question

We use JIRA 6.2.

Seemingly randomly - an issue was transitioned between two statuses - Closed to Triage.

Where normally you see "username made changes", this change displays "made changes" only, with no identification.

The change happened on a issue that had apparently not been touched for a couple years. We can't see any triggering event to cause this issue transition and we haven't seen any transitions made by a blank user before.

See the below image for what the history entry looks like.Selection_002.png

What log levels do we need on to capture data about changes like this in the future and to troubleshoot this sort of "ghost transition" ?

Selection_002.png

Rusty Newton · Answer

We make bulk issue updates very rarely. At the times of the transitions no bulk updates were made.

There are no functions or web event triggers that should trigger this particular transition that we can see.

We have one plugin that would seemingly cause this transition automatically, but it has one rule and it doesn't match this scenario, doesn't show up in that plugins logs and doesn't match the username for the plugin.

We use Server. It could be one of the plugins, but it surely isn't obvious. It would help if there were someway to relate the transition to an origin.

We have resolved it for now by adding permission restrictions on the workflow transition and that seems to have prevented whatever was doing it. Not great a perfect solution, but that is all we could do for now to block the ghost.

unknown · Answer

Certainly a strange one Rusty. Are you aware of anyone making bulk issue updates on your JIRA instance at all?

Are there any post functions set on the transition (or any web event triggers that might be firing) that might be causing this?

Also - are you using Cloud or Server? I'm wondering if another plugin might be causing issues (something like Scriptrunner, which is only available on the Server version, for instance).

Rusty Newton · Answer

Hmm, additionally we only have one rule for the Automation plugin and it doesn't account for this transition. The audit log for it doesn't show anything either.