How can we troubleshoot an issue transition and history entry that has a blank user name/id ? "made changes" with no username.

[Rusty Newton]

We use JIRA 6.2.

Seemingly randomly - an issue was transitioned between two statuses - Closed to Triage.

Where normally you see "username made changes", this change displays "made changes" only, with no identification.

The change happened on a issue that had apparently not been touched for a couple years. We can't see any triggering event to cause this issue transition and we haven't seen any transitions made by a blank user before.

See the below image for what the history entry looks like.Selection_002.png

What log levels do we need on to capture data about changes like this in the future and to troubleshoot this sort of "ghost transition" ?

[Deleted user]

Hi Rusty,

Given the time between each transition (about an hour and twenty mins), that would indicate to me that there might be an automation rule being run on all issues that is triggering the change. 

Who is your project default? Usually the assigned project default seems to make these transitions (unless it's run as the user who triggered it - which is a curly one), so I'm thinking perhaps the user that was originally set as the project default has been deleted?

Matt

[Rusty Newton]

Thanks for responding! 

The time between the first and second transition shown here is nearly two years. The time between the second transition and the third should be irrelevant as the third transition was done manually by an administrator. I blocked out the names with red, sorry.

Only the second transition in this case, the one that has no user name, is unusual for us.

The project default assignee is set to Unassigned (I'm not sure if that is what you are asking about), but we don't typically see any changes made like this. This is the first time.

We do use the Automation plugin, but all changes made by the plugin are made by a known and identifiable username.

You mentioned "user that was originally set as the project default " - do you mean that a user who was assigned as the default before, and is no longer assigned as the default, might still be used in some transitions? and even if they are deleted? I'm not sure how to determine who was set as the default before..

[Rusty Newton]

Hmm, additionally we only have one rule for the Automation plugin and it doesn't account for this transition. The audit log for it doesn't show anything either.

[Deleted user]

Certainly a strange one Rusty. Are you aware of anyone making bulk issue updates on your JIRA instance at all? 

Are there any post functions set on the transition (or any web event triggers that might be firing) that might be causing this?

Also - are you using Cloud or Server? I'm wondering if another plugin might be causing issues (something like Scriptrunner, which is only available on the Server version, for instance).

[Rusty Newton]

We make bulk issue updates very rarely. At the times of the transitions no bulk updates were made.

There are no functions or web event triggers that should trigger this particular transition that we can see.

We have one plugin that would seemingly cause this transition automatically, but it has one rule and it doesn't match this scenario, doesn't show up in that plugins logs and doesn't match the username for the plugin.

We use Server. It could be one of the plugins, but it surely isn't obvious. It would help if there were someway to relate the transition to an origin.

We have resolved it for now by adding permission restrictions on the workflow transition and that seems to have prevented whatever was doing it. Not great a perfect solution, but that is all we could do for now to block the ghost.