AD user in Jira has strange userkey JIRAUSER46614

[Salvijus Laucius]

Hi,

Our Jira SD (v4.4.2) users are synchronized from Active Directory. For most of them key, name and username values are the same. For example: 

jira.user=cccccc(cccccc) key=cccccc name=cccccc usrName=cccccc dispName=CCCC DDDD

But some of them have a weird key:

jira.user=aaaaaa(JIRAUSER46614) key=JIRAUSER46614 name=aaaaaa usrName=aaaaaa dispName=AAAA BBBBB

What does it mean? Is this an synchronization issue?

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

Hi Salvijus,

I understand that you have several users within Jira whose userkeys match their usernames, but some more recently created users have what appear to be completely random userkeys.  This is not a bug, nor is this a synchronization issue.

Instead this is a change that was made to Jira 8.2 (and Jira Service Desk 4.2) versions and higher in response to GDPR changes in Jira. All versions of Jira server 6.0 and higher have userkeys values for all users.  Historically this userkey value was made to match the username when the account was first created.  Starting in Jira 6 user accounts could be renamed, hence the need of the userkey field in order to keep historical tracking accurate.

However any newly created users in Jira 8.2 or higher will instead use this different format for their userkey when their account is first created.  From that document:

We’re changing this approach so that all user keys for new users (no changes for existing users) have the following format: JIRAUSER10100.

I hope this helps to explain the change in behavior here.

Andy

[Salvijus Laucius]

Hi Andy,

Absolutely :)

Thanks

[JAUTEE Nicolas]

Hello @Andy Heinzer ,

Is there any way to go back to the previous user keys format in JIRA 8?

Any dark feature for example?

It triggers a lot of issue in our organization currently as we just migrated to JIRA8 couple of month ago and the first new users start to appear with the JIRAUSERXXXXX format.

[Andy Heinzer]

Yes, technically there is a dark feature for that.  If you go to <Jira_URL>/secure/SiteDarkFeatures!default .jspa 

You can set the property called

com.atlassian.jira.user.dbIdBasedKeyGenerationStrategy.disabled

and in turn any new accounts created in Jira after this dark feature is set would be created with the userkey being set to the first username of that account.  Just be aware that this will not change the user_key for any existing account, this only affects newly created accounts.

Should you need to anonymize old user data in the future, then you might want to review Anonymizing users as Jira 8 has added some in product features to help here.

Andy

[Öznur Çakır]

Anonymizing is usefull for internal users isn't it ? It is not working on external users ?

[Öznur Çakır]

How can we customise external users format ? 

[Caoimhin Caldwell]

Is there a documented solution or workaround for how to change the user keys to username for already created users? This is causing issues for me with integrations with Power Bi where the user in a graph is just showing JiraUser****