Auto closing tickets after 5 days

[Tylor Seastrum]

Hey Atlassian Community, 

I am trying to put together an automation that will auto close (or switch the status to "Resolved")

I have a project called: "IT Service Desk v2"

I was thinking about running this automation every day in the morning around 5am.

I was thinking about using the following JQL with the "When: Scheduled" event. I am concerned that this mean after 5 days of the ticket getting any updates however which means my IT Service Desk agents on the ticket and reaching out would reset the timer. If I can add an exception group that would be great. If I am wrong please 
JQL: project = 'IT Service Desk v2' AND status = 'waiting on employee' AND updated <= -5d

I am stuck on being able to get jira to know when the ticket has been sitting on "waiting on employee" for 5 days in order to close. When an employee responds to one of our tickets it switches out of "waiting for employee" (not sure if this is a global ITSD project setting or due to one of our automations) I am fairly new to the Atlassian community as a system engineer and would appreciate any help. Thanks

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Tylor Seastrum 

One way to do this is with the CHANGED JQL operator: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/jql-operators/#CHANGED

For example:

project = "IT Service Desk v2"
 AND status = "waiting on employee"
 AND NOT status CHANGED AFTER -5d
 ORDER BY Key ASC

This would check that the status has not changed in the last 5 days.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Tylor Seastrum]

Good morning Bill, 

Thank you for your reply I will read up on those operators. I was curious if I needed to supply any additional information for the Key or ASC at the end of that JQL or if that is fine as is? Thanks again!

[Bill Sheboy]

Based on what you described, that expression should work.  I only put the ORDER BY on there out of habit (rather than letting it be random).

I recommend trying the JQL standalone with Filters > View All Issues, and compare results to what you expected to see.  Then adjust the query to meet your needs.

[Tylor Seastrum]

That's a great tip I hadn't thought about testing my JQL through filters. Thank you for your help! I will do some testing and then updated this thread once I have the results.

[Tylor Seastrum]

I ended up creating an SLA to keep track of the 40 hours that past. Then I created an automation that when SLA breached close ticket.