Automations failing - "Could not find your configured field, it may have been deleted?"

[Andrew Grossman]

Hello. We've recently made some configuration updates to one of our projects and have started receiving some automation failures. We're seeing the error,

Could not find your configured field, it may have been deleted?

in the detailed audit log. The following is a screenshot of what I'm seeing.

Now, I'm not quite sure what to make of this because I think it's referencing the Status field supposedly being missing. However, the Status field is absolutely present. If this is a case where JIRA has under the hood changed the id of some field, you'd think that it would either and preferably both:

1. Update the associated automations, and/or
2. Provide some additional context both in the automation configuration and in the audit log to disambiguate between previous and current fields, if that indeed is what's going on here

Of course, I'm just guessing at what's going on here, since it doesn't seem to be clear. Maybe it's something else; I see some sort of race condition alluded to at https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Automations-quot-can-not-find-configured-field-quot-suddenly/qaq-p/1624339

What I'm looking for here is:

1. What's actually the problem?
2. How is it reliably solved?
3. What's a reasonable way to ensure that all of the affected pieces are corrected. I think it's fairly unreasonable to expect a supposedly enterprise-grade tool to make the user
   1. Manually revisit every place a problematic field might have been used and rewrite the rules
   2. To do so without any sort of reporting available indicating all of the places where a supposedly obsolete field is in play, if that is the problem
   3. Alternatively, play whack-a-mole whenever a previously uncorrected automation path is encountered

Damn it, Atlassian, it's 2022. Provide decent user feedback when something goes wrong and automate what should reasonably be automated.

Apologies in advance for coming off as disgruntled about this. JIRA continues to be a frustrating and underwhelming experience.

[Mark Segall]

Hi @Andrew Grossman - Without being able to see the specifics of your Transition Action, my first guess would be that there's a field update on the transition action that is no longer available since the changes. It will tell you on that screen if there are any such fields.

[Andrew Grossman]

Thanks, Mark. So we're talking about something other than the field supposedly referenced here:?

That looks pretty clearly like it's referencing Status.

[Andrew Grossman]

Oh, I see, if I go into that particular rule, I see

But that's pretty unfriendly--why is that not being displayed on each rule summary, plus what would have caused this? I believe that all we did was change some of the allowed values for that field.

That verified what the problem is but I'm still looking for a friendly way to address it.

[Mark Segall]

Ahh - Probably on some older version of automation where status could be set as a field update action rather than a transition.  

Agree there's a bit of a learning curve to troubleshooting automation issues, but it makes sense after you've been playing with it a while (at least it did for me).

[Andrew Grossman]

I think that the above discussion points towards one possible way to investigate this.

It seems like something that IMO would still be worth be spoken to by an Atlassian rep and ideally ticketed for improvement. If this is an automation versioning problem, it looks like the versioning migration was insufficient. Further, the UI to report the problems might deserve some tinkering.

The best thing I can say about this whole affair is that the particular instance was resolvable and that the community can provide help. I'm still anticipating this coming back to bite my team and I have no doubt that others have and will encounter this.

Par for the course.