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Legal & security: read the Rule Vault Data Processing Agreement & Written Security Policy.

What Rule Vault Does

Jira keeps no history of automation rule changes — an edited or deleted rule is gone for good. Rule Vault takes a daily snapshot of every automation rule on your site, keeps a version history for each one, shows you exactly what changed, and lets you restore any rule to any previous version in one click.

You'll find Rule Vault in Jira under Settings (gear icon) → Apps → Rule Vault, in the left sidebar. The app has three tabs: Rules, Activity, and Setup.

1. First-Time Setup (Connect a Token)

Rule Vault reads your automation rules through Atlassian's Automation API, which requires an API token from a Jira admin account. A dedicated service account is recommended so the connection survives staff changes.

1. Sign in to Atlassian as the account you want Rule Vault to use, and go to id.atlassian.com → Security → API tokens.
2. Click the plain "Create API token" button — not "Create API token with scopes." Scoped tokens are rejected by the Automation API. Copy the token (it's shown only once) and note its expiry date.
3. In Rule Vault, open the Setup tab. Enter the account's email and paste the token, then click Update credentials.
4. Rule Vault tests the connection immediately. Success shows a green banner: "Connected as [email protected]. Daily snapshots are active." An error here means the token is wrong, scoped, or the account isn't a Jira admin.

2. Snapshotting Your Rules

A snapshot is a point-in-time capture of every automation rule on the site. Rules that haven't changed since the last snapshot are skipped, so snapshots are cheap and versions only accumulate when something actually changed.

• Automatic: Rule Vault snapshots your whole site once a day, on its own. No action needed.
• Manual: open the Rules tab and click Snapshot now — do this right after you make a batch of rule changes you want captured immediately.

After clicking, a status message shows how many rules were queued (e.g. "Snapshot started: 245 rules queued, 0 deletion(s) detected"). Large sites are processed in paced batches, so give a big snapshot a few minutes, then click Refresh.

The first snapshot captures every rule as version v1 — that's your baseline. From then on, each detected change adds a new version.

3. Viewing Rules and Their History

The Rules tab lists every captured rule with its current state (ENABLED / DISABLED / DELETED), how many versions Rule Vault holds, and when it last changed. The most recently changed rules sort to the top.

1. Find the rule you're interested in and click History.
2. The history panel lists every stored version (v1, v2, …) with its capture timestamp.
3. Click Diff on any version to see what changed from the previous version, in plain language — for example: "Rule renamed", "Trigger changed", "Changed action 'clone' (value.operations[3])", "Rule disabled".

Diffs ignore cosmetic noise (timestamps, metadata) — if a diff is empty, the rule was re-saved without a real change.

4. Restoring a Rule

Restore rolls a rule back to any stored version. There are two cases:

• The rule still exists: open its History, pick the version you want, click Restore. The live rule is updated in place to that version's configuration.
• The rule was deleted: it shows a DELETED badge in the Rules tab. Restore recreates it from the stored version — in a disabled state, so you can review it in Jira's automation settings and enable it deliberately. It will never start firing behind your back.

Every restore is recorded in the Activity log with who-, what-, and when-level detail, so your audit trail covers recoveries too.

5. Change Alerts (Optional)

If you want to be notified when rules change or disappear, set an alert project:

1. On the Setup tab, enter a project key (e.g. OPS) under Alert project key and save.
2. Whenever a snapshot detects modified or deleted rules, Rule Vault creates an issue in that project, labelled rule-vault-alert, listing what changed.
3. Use your existing notification scheme, watchers, or an automation on that label to route the alert to email or chat.

First-time captures don't alert — only genuine changes and deletions do.

6. The Activity Tab

The Activity tab is a running log of everything Rule Vault has observed and done: CAPTURED (new version stored), MODIFIED, DELETED, and RESTORE events, with rule names, versions, and timestamps. It's the quickest answer to "what changed on this site recently?" and doubles as evidence for audits.

7. If Something Looks Wrong

Still Stuck?

The fastest route is a ticket in our support portal — include the name of the app, what you were doing, and any error message you saw. You can also email [email protected] or call 937-217-7327, and we'll get you sorted out.