Jira Service Desk - Monitor email for tickets not created

[Alex Christensen]

Our Jira Service Desk is currently configured to process incoming emails from an email user account we've configured. Our Service Desk is for internal use only, and everyone at our company should already have access to the Service Desk project since they have an account on Jira - our Service Desk is configured so that "Customers who have an account on this JIRA site" can raise requests.

That said, we still want to make sure that all emails coming into the inbox we set up are being processed and creating tickets correctly. For example, let's say something happened during a new hire onboarding and the user wasn't given an account in JIRA, then that person tries to email our Service Desk and a ticket isn't created.

Based on my testing and the documentation, the following happens regardless of whether or not a ticket is actually created:

If you use IMAP, emails are marked as read (not deleted) after they are processed by Jira Service Desk. If you want existing messages to be pulled in by Jira Service Desk, you can move them back to your inbox and mark them as unread after the connection has been established.

I was hoping that I could get Service Desk to flag an email in the inbox somehow if the ticket wasn't created based on the new email - like adding a label, moving to a folder, or leave it unread altogether. If it did that, I could set up some Google Apps script to archive read emails, then set up some monitoring in another tool I have to see if there are still any emails in the inbox. However, since everything is just marked as read regardless of successful ticket creation, there's no way to set up monitoring to tell the difference.

Is there any other way to monitor this other than manually opening the inbox and comparing the tickets in the Service Desk project? I'm probably overthinking this, but I can't think of anything.

[Maurice · Accepted solution]

Hi Alex,

Service Desk doesn't have the ability to do this natively. The mails get changed to read so that they aren't processed over and over again in a loop.

You can view the Service Desk mail processing log under Jira Administration -> Applications -> Jira Service Desk -> Email Requests -> at the bottom is View log.

You can also view information about Service Desk's mail processing in the database tables. The relevant tables begin with:

AO_2C4ESC_*

You could potentially monitor for failures in the AO_2C4ESC_MAILITEMAUDIT.

This of course won't work well if you typically get a lot of emails that Service Desk should reject.

Hope this information helps give you some ideas on how you might accomplish what you're looking for.

[Alex Christensen]

Hi, Brian - yep, this answer is very helpful. Are there any plans to include this in a log file we could monitor?

We are also considering to use JEMH to help us monitor any failures - it appears that JEMH can email us whenever an email fails to create a ticket.

[Maurice]

Hi Alex,

While there are no current plans to include this in a log file we do have an open feature request to improve things here. It would be great if you could add your vote to this issue to increase the visibility and priority.
JSDSERVER-2517 - Notification for when an email is failed to processed

Using a plugin such as JEMH can certainly be a viable alternative to coming up with a custom solution for getting automated monitoring of mail failures.