Automation basics
Understand the general concepts and best practices of automation in Atlassian cloud products.
Automation service limits
The following automation service limits have been applied to ensure the performance of your instance is maintained.
Summary | Limit | How might this limit breach? |
|---|---|---|
Components per rule | 65 | A single rule contains more than 65 conditions, branches and actions. |
New sub-tasks per action | 50 | A rule executes the creation of over 50 sub-tasks. |
Issues searched | 1000 | A scheduled JQL search that isn't streamlined enough and returns more than 1000 issues. |
Scheduled rules that can run at the same time | 1 | A scheduled rule that takes longer than 5 minutes to execute, scheduled every 5 mins. Only single concurrent executions of this rule is allowed. |
Associated items for a rule | 5000 | Defines how many items a single rule execution can fetch. For example, a Scheduled trigger fetching 100 issues, followed by a related branch fetching 10 subtasks per issue, would add 100 * 10 = 1000 associated items to this limit. When a rule reaches this limit, it’ll be disabled to prevent future runs. |
Items queued globally | 50000 | Similar to Items queued by rule, but applies to rules in progress across your Jira instance globally. |
*Daily processing time | 60 min per 12 hrs | This could be the case, for example, if your rule talks to slow external systems. |
Loop detection | 10 | This controls how many times a rule can trigger itself (or other rules) in quick succession before the execution is stopped and marked as a LOOP. |
100 emails in a 24 hour period. This limit only applies to the Free edition of Jira Cloud and Trial licenses. |
| |
Lookup issues action (Jira automation) | 100 issues | When entering a JQL query for the Lookup issues action, only the first 100 issues will be used. |
Number of items a branch can retrieve per rule run. |
| For example, if a rule branch contains a CQL query that returns more than 150 items, the rule will only perform actions on the first 150 items. |
Number of rules that can run at the same time |
If you have multiple products on different plans, only the highest limit will count. | For example, if you have Jira Service Management Enterprise and Jira Cloud Free, your site will be able to run 30 rules at the same time. |
Atlassian Intelligence actions | 1,000 uses of the Generate AI Action items and Summarize with AI actions per 12 hours |
|
Fields limit for issues processed by automation rules | 2000 fields | This applies to the following actions:
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*You can use the Service limit breached trigger to create an automation rule to send a notification when you are approaching the daily or hourly processing limit.
Breaching limits
The following errors in your audit log may indicate that you’re breaching service limits:
The audit item status is THROTTLED.
The audit item contains:
Automation for Jira has exceeded the allowed total processing time for this rule. Maximum allowed processing time over 12 hours is (in seconds):
A JQL search in this automation rule has exceeded the allowed maximum number of issues to retrieve per search. Only the first issues up to the following limit where processed:
When a rule breaches its service limits, the audit log will provide further details about the error.
Using the information provided in the audit log, you can take several steps to ensure your rules fall below the acceptable limits. Some common precautions include:
Reducing the interval at which a scheduled rule executes. For example, only execute a rule every hour instead of every 5 minutes.
Restricting your JQL query to only search for the issues you care about. For example, check that the updated time of the issue is within a certain range (updated > -1w to include only last week's issues).
Splitting your automation rule across several rules if you need more components per rule.
For large, one-off operations that need to edit several thousands of issues, using Jira's bulk change functionality.
Queued items service limit
Automation uses a rule processing queue to manage the execution of rules in your instance. To maintain performance, rule executions are queued and the number of items processed in parallel is limited.
The automation rule builder is powerful and can allow users to create complex rule structures that can quickly increase the number of queued items.
When this limit is reached across all rules in your product, your Automation rules will no longer run.
What types of rules can cause this?
Rules with many related issue branches, where each related issue branch matches a significant number of issues.
The following example results in approximately 13,000 queued items.
A Scheduled trigger that matches 100 issues
A Related issues branch that matches 50 issues
Another Related issues branch that matches 80 issues
Rules with many Related issue branches, to simulate if conditions, can also cause large numbers of queued items. The following examples results in 3,500 items or more, depending on the number of branches.
Trigger: Issue updated
Related issues branch with JQL: type = Bug that matches 1000 issues
Related issues branch with JQL: type = Task that matches 500 issues
Related issues branch with JQL: type = Feature that matches 2000 issues
Prevention
It’s recommended to reduce the overall number of issues a rule fetches, either via the trigger or the Related issues branch.
Consider the following guidelines to help reduce the risk of hitting your queued items service limit:
Ensure you use JQL that limits the execution to the smallest possible set of issues. This can be achieved in a number of ways:
Ensure your JQL search is as specific as possible. Don't just search for issues that match type = Task if you only care about issues currently In Progress. A better alternative in this case would be: type = Task and status = "In Progress".
Use the Only include issues that have changed since the last time this rule executed option. For many rules, it's perfectly fine to operate only on this small sub-set
Don't create Related issue branches for conditional checks. In the above example, the If/else block condition could be used to match based on the issue type.
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