Handling Concurrent Executions of an Automation Rule

[Jeff Gordon]

We have an Automation for Jira rule for "when issue commented".  It checks the status of the issue and if it's a certain status it will transition the ticket to another status.  Works great most of the time.

The problem is when someone comments on the issue twice within seconds of each other.  This fires two executions of the rule.  What happens is that both executions determine that the issue is in the certain status and both of them try to transition the ticket.  One will succeed and one will fail.  In the end it's all fine because the issue ends up in the status it should be in.

But...when these failures occur we a have process in place to generate a new issue for our admin team (A4J sends email which is processed by an email handler).  Because we have a lot of automation, and teams depend on it to support their business processes, we can't ignore these failures.  In the scenario I presented above we will just end of closing the issue generated for this failure with a root cause like "known issue, no harm".

But nonetheless, we've been detracted from other work and spent time tracking down the root cause just to close out the issue.

I'm curious if anyone has found a way to mitigate this problem caused by concurrent executions of the same rule.

Here's the kind of rule we have.

[Florian Bonniec]

Hi @Jeff Gordon 

Did you enable "Execute this rule immediately when the rule is triggered, instead of in the background", in the trigger Issue Comment ?

Regards

[Florian Bonniec]

If it do not work you could complexify the automation by checking the duration between the 2 last comments.

{{issue.comments.getFromEnd(1).created.diff(issue.comments.getFromEnd(0).created).seconds}}

You will have to take into consideration the case there is only 1 comment in the automation.

Regards

[Jeff Gordon]

@Florian Bonniec  Thanks for the ideas.  I will experiment with these.