🚀 Rolling out now for automation: time delay action + new connectors to IT systems

[#1]

Hi all! I’m Makarand, Product Manager on the Jira Service Management Automation team, and I’m excited to share a look at some new automation features rolling out to your teams starting today.

We’re launching a set of new functionalities to help you automate your alert and issue remediation flows in Jira Service Management and build more complex rules that integrate with several IT Systems to automatically flag relevant alerts and issues, perform resolution action, and system checks, triage them based on the response data, and escalate to an incident or inform stakeholders if needed.

❗️Please note: these features are still in the early stages of rolling out to Premium and Enterprise customers and will be generally available later this month. Depending on your plan, please see the details below for information on which features will be available to your team.

Incorporate timed delays to manage complex workflows

Starting off, we’re releasing one of our most highly requested automation features: a delay action. With the new delay action, you’ll be able to add a break of up to 15 minutes into the middle of your automation rules, pausing progress before proceeding to the next step.

Using this new action, you can splice a timed delay between two components to modify the pacing of your rules, and give you more control over the sequencing of the steps in your workflow, like:

• Pausing an automation rule to give 3rd-party tools more time to execute remediation actions

• Granting buffer time for issues to update after they’re modified in upstream actions before proceeding with the rule

The new delay action will be available on Premium and Enterprise plans for both Jira Service Management and Jira Software.

Pool information from IT systems to triage incoming alerts and issues

As a part of this launch, we’re also rolling out two new connectors for Jira Service Management Premium and Enterprise customers (Ansible and New Relic), plus updates to some popular connectors (like AWS, Azure, and Jira Edge Connector) for performing system management actions, investigating performance, resolving requests or incidents, and remediating alerts. With these connectors in place, you will be able to weave new triaging actions into your rules to gather data from across tools and take remediation steps before escalating to an incident.

With these two new connectors, Premium and Enterprise customers will be able to use automation actions to:

• Launch job templates in Ansible: Start a job template in Ansible, like applying security patches in response to a vulnerability or starting a back-up service in response to reduced application performance.

• Run a query in New Relic: Connect to New Relic and run a query using NRQL, like checking CPU usage to determine if it’s within an expected range.

We’re also launching a new wait-for-response capability for Jira Service Management Enterprise customers using JEC, Azure, AWS, Ansible, and New Relic actions. This capability allows you to indicate that a rule should pause and resume only if the connector returns a successful response—otherwise, the step will report a failure, enabling you to escalate the alert as needed.

This will be available to Enterprise customers for the following automation actions, helping you consolidate context across tools to assess and handle incoming alerts and issues:

• Restart Virtual Machine in Azure

• Start runbook in Azure

• Run AWS SSM document

• Run script using Jira Edge Connector

• Run a query in New Relic

• Launch job template in Ansible

While we’ve designed these capabilities with remediation workflows in mind, you can also use these functionalities in your other automation rules to handle tasks like provisioning instances or services, updating configurations, or restarting systems in response to incoming requests.

Chain context together to build a cohesive remediation workflow

In addition to those connectors to IT Systems, we’re also launching new steps and actions to help you manage alerts, and chain together a remediation workflow.

Specifically, we’re launching a new change alert status action to help you build these rules. With it, you can toggle the alert status between open, acknowledge, snooze, & closed states to coincide with the state of your remediation flow and close out alerts that are automatically resolved. This will be available on Jira Service Management Premium and Enterprise plans.

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We’re excited to share this new set of capabilities, which will help you quickly separate signal from noise and help your team zero in on the events that matter most when every minute counts.

These features will be fully rolled out by the end of this month. In the meantime, if you have questions, feel free to leave them here.

[Jovin]

This is so awesome @Makarand Gomashe ! I love the increasingly available actions in Automation.

Question - could we get a "non-action" action in there called "Label" (or something else) that allows us to "comment" on what the branch/actions/etc. are doing? This would allow complex actions or conditions to have contextual information displayed on the Automation Rule editor - similar to how comments in code work.

[YY哥]

Quite cool update. Thanks @Makarand Gomashe 

May I know if in some circumstances, the delay action can replace refetch action? 

Thanks,

YY哥

[Dave Mathijs]

Looking good @Makarand Gomashe!

[Ingo Volkhausen]

Integration becoming better and better, nice 

[Fernando Eugênio da Silva]

Thanks for the news, @Makarand Gomashe 

Question for Delay action: This action will be counted in the usage? I know some actions like create variable, add a log and some others actions they don't count in the usage metrics for automation. Just want to know if delay action will be counted for the metrics.

Thanks!

[Makarand Gomashe]

Hi all,

Thank you for all the great comments and feedback! 

@Jovin interesting feedback; I will definitely take this back to the team for further explorations.

@YY哥 Currently, no. The delay action only pauses the rule for the set time period and resumes once the period is over. But yes, you can add a refetch action after the delay (for few secs/mins), if you need "re-write" the context. This gives the admins the required control, if they need to capture the values before the refetch into certain variables.

@Fernando Eugênio da Silva yes, delay action will make the rule (using it) counted towards limit, similar to all other functional actions.