"Automation" vs. "Project Automation"?

[Michael Aniskovich]

Greetings.

Can someone explain what the difference is between the out-of-the-box "Automation" capability and the "Project Automation" plug-in?  Especially, why I would choose one over the other?

Thanks in advance!

[Jack Brickey]

Is this Jira or JSD?

Automation is most like the OOTB JSD automation and Project Automation is likely associated to the Automation for Jira addon. Now with Atlassian having acquired Codebarrel (vendor of A4J) it is being integrated directly into Cloud and the same may occur in time for Server. I would hope that at that time the two automations will become one.

[Michael Aniskovich]

Thanks for the reply.  This is Jira ServiceDesk.  I'm still not sure what the differences are, and when I should use one over another.  This is quite frustrating.

[Dean Del Ponte]

I'm in the same situation and I assume "Project Automation" is the new approach and "Automation" is old approach?

If anyone can confirm this I would greatly appreciate it.

[Oliver Moore]

Agreed - for example, I can get OpsGenie to work via Automation but not "Project Automation". Not clear if this is expected.

[Jack Brickey]

Yes Automation was the original method for performing automated tasks inside JSD. Project Automation is the new kid on the block. For now they remain separate but I suspect they will be combined into a single solution. I suspect, but do not know, that any unique and useful automations available inside of Automation (like OpsGenie) will find their way into Project Automation. I also expect that the "Project" term will disappear once combined so it is simply "Automation".

[Oliver Moore]

Thanks - that's slightly annoying. We do some post processing on Incidents so the priority gets set by Project Automation following creation so am struggling to create an OpsGenie alert at the appropriate level. I had hoped the webhook in Project automation would work but it's not looking good 

[Oliver Moore]

FYI - I managed to get this to work by using a WebHook in the Project Automation by hitting the https://api.opsgenie.com/v2/alerts directly rather than trying to use the OpsGenie "integration".

[Patrick Boyd]

@Oliver Moore you can use the opsgenie integration, the trick is finding the correct payload to send to the api. 

[Oliver Moore]

@Patrick Boyd  - do you have an example as I didn't have time to work out ourt. It would be useful if atlassian documented this 🙂

[Patrick Boyd]

@Oliver Moore Well I may have done it the same way that you did.

From the jira side, I defined my conditions that constitute an alert being generated. I then, like you, created a webhook from project automation, entering in the api link that opsgenie integration gave me.

here is what I put into the payload of the webhook (make sure you choose POST and Content-Type is application/json):

{
"webhookEvent": "jira:issue_created",
"issue": {
"key": "{{issue.key}}",
"reporter": "{{issue.reporter}}",
"fields": {
"comment": {
"comments": {
"body": "{{issue.comment}}"
}
},
"status": {
"name": "{{issue.status.name}}"
},
"summary": "{{issue.summary}}",
"created": "{{now.mediumDateTime}}",
"issuetype": {
"name": "{{issue.issuetype.name}}"
},
"labels": "{{issue.labels}}",
"description": "{{issue.description.jsonEncode}}",
"reporter": {
"emailAddress": "{{issue.reporter.emailAddress}}",
"displayName": "{{issue.reporter.displayName}}"
},
"priority": {
"name": "{{issue.priority.name}}",
"id": "P{{issue.priority.id}}"
}
}
}
}

There are a few unique things in there, such as the P in front of id, that is to map the priority in jira to something that opsgenie can recognize.

Then from the opsgenie side, you can access the payload by either using their built in things, such as {{comment}} etc, or if you have unique ones, you can do it as such {{_payload.issue.fields.priority.id}} which is what I mapped the above priority to. Make sure you always ensure that the payload format is correctly jsonified using something like https://jsonlint.com/.

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/smart-values-general/

this is a link to other smart values you can use. An important thing to remember if you use smart values to pass comments/descriptions that have more than one line (which is most comments/descriptions), the smart values will (for some reason) use a window's carriage return (\n\r) instead of \n. So to get around that, I put in a .jsonEncode at the end of the smart value, and it prevents the opsgenie return error I was getting.

Hope this helps someone