Let me tell you a wild story from my work life, a situation that went from routine to red alert real quick. It involves a couple of test tickets, one massive financial institution, an overly curious audit firm, and, no kidding, a divine whisper that quite literally saved me from what could’ve been a negative career-defining moment.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Just Another Day, Just Some Test Tickets
It started off like any other day. I’m working in a client’s Atlassian instance (you know, Jira—tickets, workflows, automation rules, the whole shebang). The client? Only one of the biggest financial institutions in all of Africa. No pressure, right?
They wanted to test out some new automation rules in their system. I implemented the automations and notified them however a service desk agent requested she couldn’t see the automation.
So, I did what any good admin would do: I spun up some test tickets in their instance to test them. Nothing special. Just basic tickets to trigger the rules and confirm everything was working as requested.
Once I confirmed that everything ran smoothly, I cleaned up after myself. I deleted the test tickets. No need to clutter the workspace, especially not on a production instance for a banking giant. That’s just messy. Seems logical, right?
Except… months later, that cleanup came back to bite me.
Enter: The Auditors
Months passed. Everything was quiet… until it wasn’t.
The client undergoes a scheduled audit (they do this every quarter). No big deal… then the calls started. My manager calls me, saying the audit firm discovered some deleted ticket IDs in the logs.
Turns out, the auditors were combing through the entire system audit log and stumbled across some ticket IDs. Except—those tickets no longer existed in the system. Poof. Gone.
And the auditors flagged it.
That’s when the questions started flying in hot:
- “Where are these tickets?”
- “Why can’t we find them?”
- “Who deleted them, and what were they?”
Suddenly, I was center stage, and not in a good way.
I was on the hot seat and here’s the kicker—you can’t recover deleted tickets in Jira. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Email Automation to the Rescue… Almost
Now, here’s where things started to look hopeful. I had proactively built an automation rule that emailed every ticket created in the system to my inbox. Smart, right?
So I dove into my email, pulled up the notifications, and boom—I had emails for almost every single test ticket. I took screenshots and sent them over as evidence. That should’ve been case closed.
Except it wasn’t.
The Two Missing Ghosts
Of course, there had to be a catch.
Out of all the tickets, two had slipped through the cracks. For some reason, those two didn’t trigger email notifications. So now, there was zero visible record of their contents.
And the audit team? That was a red flag. They were not happy. They flagged the absence of those tickets as a potential integrity issue.
Their logic? “If there’s no proof of what was on those tickets, how can we be sure you weren’t deleting something sensitive or problematic to cover your tracks?”
Excuse me?
That part stung. I mean, really. What do they take me for? But hey—I get it. In business, in business, there’s no room for sentiments. Just facts.
And when there’s money, compliance, and reputations on the line? Sentiment goes out the window. Like they say, “It’s nothing personal, just business”
Still, I knew I hadn’t done anything shady. I just needed proof.
The Automation Logs Clue
At this point, I was deep in detective mode. First, I crawled through the automation audit logs. Thankfully, Atlassian does keep track of automation triggers. And yes, I found logs showing those two tickets had triggered my automation rule.
Great news! …But not quite enough.
The automation log showed the action, not the contents of the ticket. It was like saying, “Yes, something happened,” but not being able to prove what happened.
Not good enough for auditors. Calls were coming in for meetings with them. I had to face a panel of auditors… and it wasn’t going to be easy. I’d already spent close to thirty minutes on a call with my manager about this issue. I wasn’t sure what to do next.
I was preparing to send over screenshots from the automation logs (even if they didn’t prove much) while my manager set up a meeting with the person in charge of our mailbox to check if the mail had been delivered or possibly caught in our system without reaching me.
A Divine Whisper at Just the Right Time
And then… something clicked.
Out of nowhere, I got this nudge, a whisper—call it instinct or intuition, but I know it was the Holy Spirit—to go looking for the service desk agent’s test tickets that I might’ve cloned.
So I got to work. Manually.
I started plugging in ticket IDs, going back one by one, like a digital archaeologist digging through Jira’s tombs.
And then—bam! One ticket loaded.
It was a test ticket. One of those test tickets.
The Hidden Audit Trail
Now, here’s something I’ve come to appreciate greatly: Jira keeps a full audit trail inside every ticket. Not just creation dates or status changes—everything.
And there it was. Clear as day. In the ticket history:
“Cloned by [me] on [that day].”
That one entry validated everything. It tied the deleted ticket back to its origin and proved that what I created—and later deleted—was part of a legit testing process.
Found the second one the same way. It was cloned from that same ticket! What are the odds?!
Saved by Grace
To show how crazy it was: only those two tickets were created using the clone function—every other test was built from scratch. I don’t know why I cloned those two specifically, but now I know I was divinely protected.
I packaged those screenshots with a clear explanation and sent them over.
No fluff. No defensive tone. Just facts.
And then… silence.
Until the green light came.
The matter was closed. No interview. No escalation. Just a quiet thank you and a collective sigh of relief.
The Final Twist: I Was Right the First Time
Let’s not forget the cherry on top.
Turns out, my original automation rule—the one that sparked all this—was exactly what the manager wanted. The only reason I had to re-test with those two cloned tickets was because a non-technical service desk agent misunderstood the request and told me to update it.
The manager later reviewed the case and confirmed that my first automation was correct. In fact, they asked me to remove the second one.
Insert slow clap here. 😐
Lessons From the Fire
So, what did I walk away with?
- Never delete without a trace—especially in audited environments.
- Use audit logs like a forensic tool—they might not show content, but they show the trail.
- Listen to that quiet voice—sometimes, the answer isn’t in the logs but in the pause.
- And yes, God cares about Jira tickets too, apparently.
The Takeaway? Document Everything and Trust the Nudge
Honestly, this could’ve ended differently. But I believe grace showed up in the form of a whisper to check the audit trail. And that whisper saved me from a grilling I wasn’t ready for.
Remember: receipts matter, document everything and Trust the Nudge! (I can’t stress this enough!)
Stay clouding,
Samuel Barden