Automation actors in Confluence

[Koloman Pfeffer]

Hello, Confluence admins,

I want to ask you about automation actors in Confluence.

Right now Confluence does not allow to change the actor from the rule owner to anyone else, which presents a few problems. As an admin, almost all automation rules, especially global ones, are created and owned by me and therefore executed on my behalf. This would be fine, if some of the rules' actions wouldn't count as page edits and therefore it looks like I am editing a bunch of pages, I didn't.

Setting up a dedicated automation user and making it owner/actor works, but then I need to check all rules daily because I'm not notified, if there are any errors.

Because of this I would really enjoy having a dedicated Automation User as in Jira.

Is this a concern, any of you have as well or am I overlooking something? Maybe some of you also have input, whether this is already on a development roadmap.

Thanks and have a great day!

[Connor · Accepted solution]

Hi @Koloman Pfeffer I've tested this today so there could be cons I'm not aware of, but I set some rules to have me as the rule owner and a service account as the rule actor. This does mean paying for an extra license, but if that's not a problem I think it meets your requirements. Here's what I did.

Create automation service account

1. Create the automation user, and provide it Confluence product access.
2. Grant the automation user admin and whatever else Space permissions to desired spaces.

Create automation rules

1. Create your automation rules while logged in as yourself.
2. Set Who can edit this rule? to All admins. (or Specific admins and add the automation user, yourself, and whoever else)

Change the automation rule actor

1. Login as the automation user.
2. Edit the desired rules and change the rule actor to the automation user.

It's a bit convoluted, and it would be nice if Atlassian provided an actual automation user like in Jira, but it seems to get the job done. 

[Koloman Pfeffer]

Hi @Connor

This is ultimately right now the solution I used, but it still makes detecting errors a bit more tedious, because I have to monitor another mailbox for error messages.

So thanks for the input and let's hope there's something coming along from Atlassian.

[Rune Rasmussen]

This is absolutely a concern of ours, and the main reason why we haven't really made many global automations in Confluence.

While I may have missed something, or just not looked hard enough, I haven't seen any feature requests, or anything of the like, that would indicate that this is actively being worked on.

[Jehan Bhathena]

Hi @Koloman Pfeffer 

There is an open ticket with Atlassian for this

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-78964

[Koloman Pfeffer]

Hi @Jehan Bhathena

thanks for the info - just for completeness sake, the ticket you linked is a duplicate and already closed, but this one is open: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-78964.

I voted for it, but it seems to be somewhat buried and only has 3 votes so far, I guess because it's a problem regular users won't care too much about.

But this post seems to gain a bit more traction than the ticket ;)

[Jehan Bhathena]

Thanks for the updated ticket link @Koloman Pfeffer .

Please do mark this thread as the Accepted answer if it solved your query,so that it's more visible to the rest of our community.

[Tracy Stimac]

Thanks for raising this item.  Now up to 10 votes!  

[Susan Waldrip]

Agreed! Thanks @Koloman Pfeffer for bringing this up.

[Richard Ryan]

Koloman, could you give us a specific use case of the issue that you are trying to solve or avoid?  Thanks!

[Koloman Pfeffer]

Hi @Richard Ryan

as I stated in the OP, global automations are all acted on my behalf, which makes me show up in the page edits, although the edit has been done by an automation. This is a distinctly different action than me personally editing a page and should also be reflected as such.

Right now, we have installed a company wide content management policy and I want to enforce it via automations, but then users ask me all the time, why I edited their page and what I did change. By having a dedicated automation user it would be clear what has happened and why.

Additionally we have some spaces that are under a quality management regime, where we need to closely track all edits and there it makes a big difference if page edits are done by an automation or by a user.

As other users have also stated, this could also lead to problems, when (space) admins are leaving or change position and thus rules start to fail without anyone noticing.