Smartsheet Jira Connector: Jira webhooks

Who can use this?

Plans:

  • Smartsheet Advance Package
  • Business
  • Enterprise

Jira webhooks

The webhook scheme of the Smartsheet Jira Connector provides enhanced efficiency. All bi-directional workflows created after Novermber 15, 2023 benefit from a shared webhook system. This strategic enhancement aligns with the July 2024 Atlassian Jira Cloud limit change to 100 Jira webhooks per Jira environment. The advantage? You can establish as many workflows as necessary, circumventing Jira's webhook constraints.

Convert existing workflows to the new model

As a best practice, you should migrate all your workflows to the the 100 Jira webhook model. 

To start this process, a System Admin or Jira Connector Admin from your account must do the following:

  1. Navigate to the Jira Connector Admin Dashboard.

  2. Select the Migrate Workflows button.

    If you receive an alert indicating that some workflows failed to migrate after selecting the button, try again. Once you've successfully migrated all workflows, you can no longer see the Migrate Workflows button. This change doesn't impact existing workflows, and there's no need to re-enable them.

Migrate Workflows button in the Jira Admin Dashboard

Consolidate automated workflows when possible

Atlassian’s best practices for webhooks suggest having as few webhooks as possible. One way to consolidate workflows is to use a more general filter on the workflow and use the connected sheet as a staging site for your data. You can then use DataMesh to filter and send data between sheets.

If you have many workflows and are experiencing Jira slowness, visit Atlassian’s webhook troubleshooting guide to find ways your Jira Admin can diagnose which webhooks are causing the slowness.

Enable asynchronous webhook processing

By default, Jira Server and DataCenter process these webhooks individually after every change to an issue.

Jira has an unofficial dark feature that tells Jira to process webhooks asynchronously, making the UI more responsive after changes. Enabling this change requires permission from a user with Jira Administrator.

According to this Jira ticket, you can enable the feature by:

  1. Manually enabling the com.atlassian.jira.webhookEventsAsyncProcessing feature flag with the following instructions.
  2. Restart your Jira instance (or each node in case of DC)

The following versions of Jira Server and DataCenter can enable this feature:

  • 8.13.25, 8.20.12 or later
  • 9.2.0 or later

FAQ

Webhook limit exceeded

If you've received this message, this means you're using more than 100 webhooks within your Jira environment. As Atlassian is enforcing a 100 webhook limit per Jira Cloud instance, you should take the following actions to reduce your webhook count below 100.

  1. Identify how many bi-directional workflows you're using,
  2. Disable enough bi-directional workflows to drop below the 100 webhook count (i.e. will need to have at minimum less than 100 bi-directional workflows).
  3. Once the bi-directional workflows are disabled by an admin or the workflow owner, you can convert existing workflows to the new system.
  4. Have the workflow owner refresh the page, then select the Reset button to re-enable the workflow. After confirming the workflow has successfully reset, continue this process for the remaining disabled bi-directional Jira workflows.

This action should be taken by the workflow owner as any Jira user can disable a workflow but only the owner can re-enable a workflow.