Over the next few weeks, we'll be rolling out a new Atlassian Automation enhancement across all products and editions, designed to increase the reliability of your rules. Automation will now attempt to retry Automation rules that have been stopped by temporary system issues, ensuring that your workflows continue to run smoothly without interrupting your team.
Understanding the difference between configuration and system errors is key to knowing when rules may be retried. Configuration errors arise from issues in setting up the components in your rule (e.g. Creating a work item in a project that has been deleted) or changes in external systems (such as when the Send Web Request action points to a deprecated third-party API endpoint). These types of errors will not trigger an automatic retry.
Conversely, system errors are temporary interruptions within the Atlassian platform, such as brief service outages. For instance, if you have an Automation that transitions a work item from one status to another based on specific conditions, and it halts mid-run due to a transient error, Automation may attempt to retry the rule from the point of interruption. This process continues until either the action is successfully executed, or the 7-day retry window expires from the time of the initial error. The mechanism to retry rules itself does not contribute to the processing time for a rule - only the time to process the actions taken do. To learn more about when a rule may be retried from a system error, check out the support documentation here.
Typically, when rule retry is working it will go unnoticed. However, you can view which rules are queued for retry and which have been successfully retried in the Audit Log. There are three statuses you may encounter:
When a rule stops due to a system error and is waiting or in the process of being retried, it will have the status queued for retry. To find out exactly where the rule stopped, click 'Show more' to view the component that stopped.
If a rule was interrupted due to a system error and subsequently retried successfully, it will show the existing success status. When you click ‘show more’, the component that was retried will display a circular arrow icon instead of a check mark, indicating it was retried.
If a rule stopped due to a system error, was retried but the rule ultimately failed, it will show the existing failure status and details in ‘show more’.
The rollout of rule retry will start on the 3rd of March, 2025. Initially, it will be gradually introduced with a select few components, with additional components to be added in the following weeks. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please drop a comment below.
Simon Chan
Principal Product Manger - Automation
Atlassian
Canberra, Australia
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