Auto-close old Jira support issues

Jira Service Management is such a great tool to manage support for customers or employees. Add Jira automation to the mix and it takes things to a whole new level.

You can empower your support engineers, save countless hours and still provide flawless support by using automation as your magic power. This rule, and the others in the playground, are good examples of how.

Jira Software and Jira Service Management logos showing automation use case

The automation recipe

Step 1: Choose your trigger

Every automation rule starts with a trigger. We are going to use the Scheduled trigger here. We will set it to run every day but use the JQL filter to ensure we are only seeking out the right issues, namely those which haven’t been updated by a customer in 5 days.

The JQL for our use case is: status = “Waiting for customer” and updated < -5d

Step 2: Add an action

We don’t need to add a condition because we included JQL in our trigger. We can just choose the ‘Transition issue’ action and specify the status as ‘Resolved’.

Now we have found all ‘stale’ issues and automatically resolved them so Jira remains up to date for reporting purposes.

Step 3: Add a comment action to the issue

Automatically resolving the issue solves one problem. However, we want to ensure we are being as transparent as possible so customers understand why it has been closed.

To do this, we add a comment to the issue. You can use smart values to personalize the message. In this case, it will print off the customer’s first name.

*This rule often goes hand in hand with ‘Re-open Jira issue when a customer comments’

Step 4: Test it!

This is an easy rule to test. You can try it in a sample project on your own instance and follow the breadcrumbs in the audit log. Also, you can play around with the smart values using the debug method.

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