Jira Stale Issue and SLA Escalation

Overview

This flow keeps a Jira backlog healthy. On a daily schedule it searches Jira (via JQL) for unresolved issues that have gone idle past a configurable threshold, then for each one it nudges the assignee with a comment on the issue, escalates to the team's Microsoft Teams channel, and emails a consolidated digest to the lead. Every escalation carries a single correlation id so one sweep can be traced end-to-end across Jira, Teams, and Outlook.

Why it matters: issues silently rot in the backlog. A proactive aging/SLA pass keeps work moving and surfaces neglected items before they breach SLA.

Ships Off (Stopped).

Use Case

A delivery team (project managers and developers) wants automatic detection and escalation of stale or SLA-breaching Jira issues, without anyone manually combing the backlog. The flow runs every morning, flags everything idle past the threshold, and makes the neglect visible to both the assignee (on the issue) and the lead (by email + Teams).

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Idle threshold

Change flowlibs_IdleDays (3, 7, 14); the JQL rebuilds automatically.

Per-status SLA

flowlibs_StatusSlaMap holds a status-to-max-days map; extend the loop to flag specific columns (e.g. Blocked > 2 days).

Auto-transition

Add a Jira UpdateTransition in the loop to move very stale issues to a triage status.

Throttle nudges

Track already-nudged issues (e.g. a Dataverse log keyed by issue + date) so the same issue is not commented every day.

Schedule

Adjust the daily sweep recurrence frequency/time/timezone.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

concat('updated <= -', variables('varIdleDays'), 'd AND statusCategory != Done ORDER BY updated ASC')

div(sub(ticks(utcNow()), ticks(item()?['fields']?['updated'])), 36000000000)

outputs('Search_Stale_Issues')?['body']?['issues']

guid()