How do I find if an issue has been deleted?

[Robert Aroney]

A user reported a defect went from Open to Closed by using the "Close Issue" button, but something broke.

Now I cannot see the issue at all, but get a message: The issue you are trying to view does not exist.

Is it possible to search for deleted issues, search for logs to say when issues are deleted (and by whom)?

[Faisal · Accepted solution]

Hey Robert,

At the moment JIRA doesn't have the audit trailing feature to indicate which issue has been deleted, and by which user.

However in order to check if there's any issue has been deleted, perhaps we may try to refer to the access logs. I did a quick test on my side, and found that delete issue operation will be captured in the access logs, something like below:
admin [08/Aug/2012:13:35:20 +0800] "GET /secure/DeleteIssue!default.jspa?id=10100&decorator=dialog&inline=true&_=1344404110568 HTTP/1.1" 200 927 10074 "http://localhost:8080/browse/TP-2" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_4) AppleWebKit/534.57.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.7 Safari/534.57.2" "2y5jtq"

Basically in order to check if there's any issue been deleted from your JIRA instance, you may try to find the log entry which is calling the /secure/DeleteIssue!default.jspa? URL. The access logs can be located in the $JIRA_INSTALL/logs/access_log.*

Hope that the info helps!

Cheers.

[Robert Aroney]

Hi Ahmad,

Thanks for the quick response. That is handy to know about the access logs.

We are using an ondemand instance at the moment, so is there any chance of getting an extract from the logs for our instance?

I'll try to find out more info about when the issue occurred from the user who told me about it (at the moment my best guess is around 10:30 -- 4 or 4.5 hours before I posted my question. This was in the "dcrimp" instance).

[Michael Knight]

You can submit a support request and ask the engineer to check if a particular issue has been deleted. They will not give you the raw logs but they will inspect the logs for you if you give them the issue key to check.

Note that not all forms of deletion will allow for identification in the logs, e.g. bulk delete.

[Gauri Mohile]

How do i find out which user deleted an Issue in OnDemand Jira?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Rather an old question to add a comment on, things have changed. The auditor plugin I mentioned is effectively built in to Jira 6.3 and above. If you enable it, it will track deletes. I don't know if it is enabled by default in OnDemand. If it is not active, then you have no way of knowing who deleted an issue.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

If you're not using OnDemand, then there's a plugin that will audit events including deletes - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.plugenta.jiraauditor