Audit log entries to see who viewed an issue?

[Michael Thompson]

I have an interesting question for the community. My Director of Security Operations wants me to build him a new project in Jira Cloud to handle a series of incident reports. It will be restricted to his security team, and I can meet all of his requirements except one.

He is looking to get a daily report of who viewed issues in this project. I thought I could do this with the audit logs. At admin.atlassian.com I can view organizational audit logs, and I can filter on "Viewed Jira issue". Unfortunatley it doesn't show anything, as in this search I did on my own activity over the last week.

So I looked in the Jira Cloud audit log, but also got nothing and no option to filter on issue views. Checking the documenation, I see this paragraph.

The audit log isn't intended to record all activity in Jira. For example, it doesn't track issue updates or pages that are viewed by a user. The audit log is intended to record configuration changes that can impact users and projects.

So it seems like there was an intent to log views at the organization level but it never happened.

Is there any way to track issue views for a specific project? Not changes or updates, just who viewed the issues.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael,

The simple answer is "no".

Jira does not log issue views, mainly because it would be a massive overhead in data, slowing performance, but it's also horribly complex to implement and probably won't tell you what you need to know.

I've viewed several issues in a couple of Jira systems today.  Not once by the issue view at  https://mysystem/jira/browse/ABC-123.  I've read what I needed from the issue navigator, my dashboard gadgets, the cards on a board, and from my IDE.

There would be two approaches to seeing who had read an issue - capture only the issue view (today, it would look like I have not read any issue), or capture everything (today, I would have read several hundred, via 500 cards across many boards, a couple of searches, and on my dashboard when I first logged in).  Neither of those are going to tell your director if his team had actually read the issue.

[Michael Thompson]

Thank you Nic!

[Claus Østergaard Pedersen]

Just an update to this question.

Apparently you can now log who viewed issues, although this is only available for Atlassian Enterprise: https://support.atlassian.com/organization-administration/docs/track-organization-activities-from-the-audit-log/

This makes @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- point about what constitutes an issue view even more interesting.

Best regards

Claus