Automation rules suddenly failing due to Epic Link Issues

[Colleen Gotling]

Is anyone else having sporadic issues with automation rules, especially as they related to the parent issue?  I have some automation that is trigger when a child issue is created.  A sql query is run that looks at all the child issues and updates the Epic with information.  For some reason all of a sudden starting yesterday (I think), sometimes the rule is failing and it is because it can't find any issues with the issue link of the parent.  I even tried running the query outside of the automation and something is weird with this link.  

Is anyone else having issues with Epic links?

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Colleen Gotling 

I wonder if it is related to the epic field changes rolling out for a while now: https://confluence.atlassian.com/cloud/blog/2023/04/atlassian-cloud-changes-mar-27-to-apr-3-2023

I checked and did not see any symptoms noted about this on the status page, developer community, or public backlog for defects/suggestions.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Colleen Gotling]

Thanks @Bill Sheboy I will definitely need to look into this further.  It sounds like this could be what is causing the issue and I might just need to make some updates.  It appears to be happening on issues where the user changed the Epic summary so maybe something got disconnected.  This is very helpful.  Really appreciate your quick response.

[Colleen Gotling]

It must have just been something going on that day because it started working again.  But thanks for your assistance.

[Bill Sheboy]

Ah...this sounds more like a timing issue.  If you post an image of your entire rule that may help confirm that.

FYI when using the issue created trigger, timing issues can occur because the rule can start before all of the data is available to the rule...leading to non-deterministic behavior.  A work-around for that is to add the Re-fetch Issue immediately after the Issue Created trigger, as this will slow down the rule and reload the data before proceeding.