Summary

This article is meant to provide some tips on how to troubleshoot issues where a Jira user did not receive a notification (while they were expecting to receive one). It also lists the most common root causes that have been discovered so far.

Note that this article is about Jira Notifications (configured in Jira projects in Project Settings > Notifications), which is a different type of notification than the Jira Service Management (JSM) Customer Notifications configured in Project Settings > Customer Notifications. If you are looking to troubleshoot Customer notifications, refer article: How to troubleshoot customer notifications in Jira Service Management Cloud

Environment

Jira Cloud

Troubleshooting tips

Understanding the different types of notifications that come with Jira and Service Management

It is important to understand what types of notifications exist in Jira and Jira Service Management (JSM) and how they work. When Jira and Jira Service Management are both running together, two main types of notifications might come into play, depending on how Jira is configured and what projects are involved. These types of notifications are listed below:

• The Jira notifications:
  
  • they are sent to:
    • all users working on Jira Work Management and Jira Software tickets
    • users acting as agents in JSM tickets
  • they are configured through the Notification Schemes, via the page Project Settings > Notifications
• The JSM customer notifications:
  • they are sent to users acting as customers in JSM tickets
  • they are configured via the page Project Settings > Customer Notifications

Asking the right questions

When troubleshooting Jira notification issues, it is important to first clarify the following points,

• What is the type of Jira project where the notification issue is happening?

  • If the problem is related to a Jira Core or Software ticket, then only the Jira notifications will come into play

  • If the problem is related to a JSM ticket, then there will be 2 types of notifications that come into play:

    • The Jira notifications, which are sent to agents (users with Jira application access via a license)
    • The JSM Customer notifications, which are sent to customers (users without a license and with customer portal access)

• In the case of a JSM ticket, make sure that you understand if the impacted user is treated as an agent (Jira notification issue) or a customer (Customer Notification issue)

  • For more information about it, you can refer to the article What notifications do my customers and team receive?
• Clarify the scope of the issue:
  • How many users were supposed to receive a notification from a Jira issue (just a specific user? several users?)?
  • Does the issue impact all tickets from a particular project? Or a specific ticket from this project?
  • Does the issue only occur during a transition or a specific action?

• For the user who did not receive the notification, check if the user who triggered the notification is the same user who did not receive the notification

  • In such cases, the user will only receive notifications from their own updates if the setting You make changes to the issue is enabled in this user’s profile

Useful Tools

The following tools can be handy when troubleshooting Jira notification issues:

• The Notification Helper

  • This tool is located on the page ⚙ > System > Notification Helper

  • This tool will help confirm whether a given Jira user is eligible to receive a notification based on a specific event

  •  Note that this tool only checks if the user is eligible to receive the notification, but does not guarantee that the user will actually receive it (since other parameters will come into play)
  • When using this tool, make sure to test the impacted user along with the impacted Jira ticket and the event for which this user did not receive a notification

• The Permission Helper

  • This tool is located in the page ⚙ > System > Permission Helper

  • This tool will help confirm whether a given Jira user has permission to view a specific issue (since it is a requirement for a user to receive notifications from a Jira issue)

  • When using this tool, make sure to test the impacted user along with the impacted Jira ticket and the Browse Projects permission

Conditions required for a user to receive a Jira notification from any ticket

• the user needs to be able to view the ticket (which depends on the Browse Projects permission and the security scheme configuration)

• the user needs to be associated with the right event via the Notification Scheme configuration

• in case of a status transition (such as "Close issue", "Resolve issue", etc...), the right event needs to be fired in the post-functions associated to this transition

• the user who made the update to the ticket needs to be a different user than the recipient of the notification (unless My Changes: Notify me is enabled for this user)

Solution

Common Root Causes

Root Cause 1 - the impacted user is not eligible to receive the notification as per the notification scheme

For a user to receive a notification from a Jira issue, this user needs to be eligible to receive it as per the notification scheme configuration. For example, for a user to receive a notification when a comment is added to a Jira issue, this user needs to be a recipient of the Issue Commented event.

This check if this root cause is relevant, you can use the Notification Helper tool, which is located in the ⚙ > System > Notification Helper

• This tool will help confirm whether a given Jira user is eligible to receive a notification based on a specific event
• When using this tool, make sure to test the impacted user along with the impacted Jira ticket and the event for which the user did not receive a notification

If this tool shows that the user should not receive the notification from the given event, then this root cause applies, and you will need to edit the Notification Scheme configuration (via the page Project Settings > Notifications) to make sure this user is a recipient for the event (for example via a user group, a project role, a single user etc...).

Root Cause 2 - the user is not allowed to view the issue

For a user to receive a notification from a Jira issue, this user needs to be allowed to view the issue. There are 2 situations where a user might not have the right to view a specific Jira issue:

• This user is not granted the Browse Projects permission within the project
• Or there is a security level set for this Jira issue, and this user was not added to the Security Scheme configuration

To check if this root cause is relevant, you can use the Permission Helper tool, which is located in the ⚙ > System > Permission Helper

• This tool will help confirm whether a given Jira user has permission to view a specific issue (since it is a requirement for a user to receive notifications from a Jira issue)

• When using this tool, make sure to test the impacted user along with the impacted Jira ticket and the Browse Projects permission

Example of failure from the Permission Helper tool:

• Failure due to the Browse Projects permission

Root Cause 3 - the impacted user might have unsubscribed from receiving the notifications

Occasionally, the affected user might have unsubscribed from the notifications as per the following scenarios:

1) The user might have enabled "Don't send me email notifications" under https://id.atlassian.com> Profile picture > Personal settings>  Email notifications for issue activity.

2) If the user is not receiving the notification only for the actions made by them, the user might have disabled You make changes to the issue notification under  https://id.atlassian.com> Profile picture > Personal settings>  Email notifications for issue activity.

Root Cause 4 -The problematic Jira issue is from a JSM project and the impacted user is treated as a customer on the ticket

It could be possible that the user might not be an assignee or a watcher on that ticket and is added as a reporter, request participant or in the customer organization. When this happens, the user will be treated as a customer within the ticket and will only receive JSM customer notifications. Internal Jira notifications are not triggered to that user. To solve this, remove the user from the above fields.

To remove the user from the customer organization, go to the project > Customers > Remove the user from the Organization

Root Cause 5 - the transition is not firing the right event in its post-function configuration (especially for the transitions "Create", "Close Issue" or "Resolve Issue")

Scenario 1

A common scenario where this root cause applies is the following:

• An issue was closed (or resolved) using the "Close issue" (or "Resolve Issue") transition
• A user is a watcher (or reporter or assignee) of that issue
• According to the Notification scheme configuration in the project, this user should receive notifications on the event Issue Closed (or Issue Resolved)

• However, this user does not receive a notification when the issue is closed (or resolved)

For a user to receive a notification from a particular transition, this user needs to be a recipient of the event fired during the transition. Using the scenario above, if the Close Issue transition is firing the Generic Event (instead of the Issue Closed event) as shown in the screenshot below, then the user will only receive a notification if this user is configured as a recipient of the Generic Event:

To fix this issue, you can:

• either set the event fired by the transition to Issue Closed, by editing the workflow and modifying the post-functions associated with this transition. For more information, refer to the documentation Advanced workflow configuration
• configure the notification scheme associated with the project, so that the impacted user can receive notifications on the event Generic Event

Scenario 2

Another common scenario where this root cause applies is the following:

• A new issue was created
• A user was supposed to receive a notification from this issue as per the Notification scheme configuration in the project since this user should receive notifications on the event Issue Created

For a user to receive a notification when a new issue is created, this user needs to be a recipient of the event fired during the Create transition (which is configured in the post-functions associated with that transition in the workflow). If a different event is fired during this transition, then only the users associated with that event in the notification scheme configuration will be eligible to receive a notification.