Jira Assets automation: Is it limited?

Assets automation is the capability within Jira Service Management to set up automated rules that trigger actions based on changes or specific conditions related to your managed assets, like hardware, software licenses, or other company resources, essentially streamlining asset management processes by eliminating manual data updates and triggering notifications based on asset status or life-cycle events.

Jira assets are objects that can be updated using Jira automation rules. Jira automation is a feature that allows usage for automating workflows and processing without needing to code. Sounds great, doesn’t it?– but there are some things to consider as you start on the journey of automating your assets:

• Automation rules are created specifically for each object schema within Assets, allowing the user to tailor actions based on the type of asset being managed. For example, you can create rules that define what should happen when specific conditions are met, such as rules that can be made to automatically assign new issues to the issue creator or when to update assets. 
• Assets in Jira Service Management allows users to track assets, configuration items, resources, and more for your team community. You can also set up triggers based on events like when an asset is created or updated or when specific attributes change, leading to automated actions like sending notifications, creating Jira issues, or updating asset details. 
• You can update object attribute values using smart values, string values, or the ID/Key of an Assets object.
• The software logs and sends notifications when a software license is nearing its expiry date. 
• You can automatically create a Jira ticket when an asset goes down or experiences a critical issue. 
• You can enforce consistent data entry by automatically correcting asset names or formatting attributes.

Both Jira Service Management and Assets are great products individually and integrate natively. The more you can leverage Automation as a bridge between the two, the more you can provide opportunities and efficiencies. To better understand what this all means, here’s a quick breakdown of what limitations can look like.

Consider a scenario where customers must adhere to regulatory compliance. They need to create Jira requests for teams to inspect Assets regularly. When you go to create an automation for this, you realize that only 100 records are returned/created using the Lookup objects action. Yikes, when you check the log, there are more than 100 Assets that need to be inspected!

Though the Lookup objects action in the Automation rules is currently limited to the 100 objects, which is covered in this article, it would be relevant to have a larger limit of objects that could be queried at the same time for environments and communities with many assets.

So, the big question–is Jira Automation for Assets Limited? Ultimately, the answer is both yes and no. 

Work management and Jira automation: Limitations for Assets
Jira Asset fields have a few limitations, including limits on the number of schemas, values, attributes, and constraints per object type. However, there are limits on the number of URLs, emails, and select attributes per object, whether working within Confluence or Jira directly, that your work community should log.

Simply put, yes, Jira Assets automation does have limitations, particularly when it comes to querying large numbers of assets using the "Lookup objects" action within automation rules, which is capped at 100 objects at a time; this can be restrictive for environments with an extensive asset database for content. Here is some guidance on specific suggestions to factor in:

Limitations: Schemas, attributes and constraints

The primary limitation is the 100 object limit when using the "Lookup objects" action in automation rules, meaning you can only query a maximum of 100 assets at once. Here are a few considerations:

• There are a maximum of 100 schemas globally
• There are a maximum of 120 attributes per object type
• There are a maximum of two unique constraints per object type
• There are a maximum of 50 URLs, email, and select attributes per object

Suggestions for other limitations for Jira Assets

While you can automate actions related to Assets, the integration with the full Automation for Jira functionality might be limited in specific scenarios, especially when creating new Asset objects directly through automation. Access to the Assets feature is usually limited to higher-tier Jira Service Management plans. Here are a few other key points and suggestions:

• Automation rules for team-managed projects in Jira Cloud cannot access parent issue values when creating issues or flagging issues.
• Users are limited in the number of components per rule, new sub-tasks per action, issues searched, and scheduling rules that can run simultaneously to perform actions more automatically.
• There are limits on the daily processing time of content, rule rate, max rule execution count per hour, and the number of items queued per rule.
• A user can also automatically update the attributes for an asset object.

Getting around limits for Jira Assets Automation

So…can you get around limitations? This is especially crucial to know for work management when waiting for an update on the Suggestion request is not an option. Here’s an example step-by-step guide.

• Step 1: You as the user, should try the GET Send web request function to send an API request to Assets to get the Object Key.
• Step 2: Get the Asset Workspace ID. (The Workspace ID is used, and the API query within the URL string is your query to determine which objects should be fetched)
• Step 3: Use Advanced branching. The Variable name processes the branch variables individually.
• Step 4: Now you can use the Lookup objects action within the branch with the previous Variable, but currently, it's not limited to 100 records! 100 percent working, not limited to 100 objects!

In this case, the output created Jira tickets on a schedule to inspect Asset items for regulatory compliance. Smart Values were used to fill out needed information for each request from the corresponding Asset. This is just one example of what can be done with this method. There are many other scenarios in which this could be useful. For instance, Jira Bitbucket integrates Atlassian's Jira project management tool and Bitbucket's code repository management tool.

Quick take: How to configure Jira automation rules for Assets

• Open the schema
• Select Object schema > Configure
• Switch to the Automation tab
• Create a rule
• Enter the rule's name and description
• Select the WHEN, IF, and THEN boxes
• Add an event, condition, and action
• Select Save to save the rule