how to automate link notifications?

[Zach Leber]

We'd like to use Jira Service Desk Cloud to log new service tickets in a next-gen project. We have a second project which is a classic business project, containing one issue for each of our company's machines in the field (~500). We want our agents to link all new service tickets to the machine ticket they affect. This way we can have watchers on those machines that can get notified. Those watchers might be account managers for instance.

I was surprised to learn that making a new link to an issue does not trigger an issue update so we can't leverage any built-in notification actions. Any workarounds there?

I built some automation which was tricky because the links can be made in either direction (from help ticket to machine or vice versa), necessitating logic like the following, which is very complicated. Furthermore, since we are linking from one project to another, we will have to enable this as a global rule rather than a project rule and there's a hard limit on the number of times you can run a global rule per month.

Any ideas would be appreciated. I just want to send an email to the assignee of a ticket whenever another ticket is linked to it. I'm trying not to use additional plugins but that is an option if necessary. Thanks for reading this far.

[Earl McCutcheon · Accepted solution]

Hello @Zach Leber ,

Thanks for reaching out, an looking at this and taking into context the first question you asked I believe you can solve this with the following approach:

I was surprised to learn that making a new link to an issue does not trigger an issue update so we can't leverage any built-in notification actions. Any workarounds there?

The list of notification events are covered  HERE, and as you noted there is no event triggered for linking an issue, however to trigger notifications on linked issues, it is a matter of triggering the desired events on your linked issues using an automation on the source issue. 

Something like the following would be set up in the source projects automation rules, noting that it needs to be a Global Rule to complete an action in an alternate project:  "when issue linked" > "FOR: Linked Issues" > "THEN: Transition issue to Looping status"

The following post in the Jira Article section of the community gives a really good break down on a method you can use to create a "Do Something" looping transition in a workflow to set this action up:

• How to get to the next level in workflow design

Then on the post function triggered by the automation rule of that transition set up all the desired events for your notification scheme to send the notification based on the transition rather than the automation directly.

Regards,
Earl