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Metrics type: Key MetricsCategory: Project Management
If the API token expires we silently stop creating tickets, every audit finding goes into the void. Surface 7 days early.

At a glance

The silent-failure tripwire for the Jira connection. Atlassian API tokens expire (typically 1 year for Jira Cloud Personal Access Tokens, or whenever the user manually revokes one); when they do, the Vortex IQ → Jira ticket-creation pipeline stops working with no error visible to the merchant unless a card surfaces it. This card lights up 7 days before the token TTL elapses so the merchant can rotate it before audit findings start dropping into the void.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Jira data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

A UK SaaS-merchant hybrid running BigCommerce + Vortex IQ + Jira Cloud, connected for 11 months. Reading taken at 08:15 GMT on 22 Mar 26. The card displays:
Atlassian token expires in 4 days (expires 26 Mar 26 at 09:00 UTC) Status: WARN Action: [Rotate token now]
What happened and what to do:
  1. The 365-day TTL is up. When the merchant connected Jira on 26 Mar 25 they generated an Atlassian Personal Access Token with the default 1-year TTL. The card has been showing healthy for 358 days; it transitioned to warn yesterday at the 7-day threshold.
  2. The cost of doing nothing for 4 days. On 26 Mar the token expires; dispatch goes silent. Audit-cycle frequency for this merchant is 6 hours, so within 6 hours of expiry the first Critical/High finding starts queuing un-dispatched. By day 7 of silence (02 Apr 26), Critical Findings Without a Jira Ticket lights up with the first un-ticketed Critical, by then the merchant has missed roughly 7 to 14 un-dispatched findings (mix of severities) over a 7-day window. For this brand’s audit profile the historical pattern is 1 to 2 Critical and 4 to 6 High per week.
  3. The rotation is 90 seconds of work. Click the in-card Rotate token button: Vortex IQ deep-links to Atlassian’s token page, the merchant clicks Create API token, names it Vortex IQ - 26 Mar 26, copies the value, pastes back into Vortex IQ, clicks Save. The card flips back to healthy (TTL ~365 days) within 60 seconds.
  4. The post-rotation verification. Open Finding-to-Ticket Dispatch Lag, it should drop to its baseline (typically <2 minutes p95) immediately. If it doesn’t, the new token has a permission scope problem; click Test connection on the connector page and the API call surfaces the specific error.
Compare against the merchant’s reading 8 days ago: 12 days remaining, healthy. The transition from green to amber is the prompt; ignore it for 7 days and the card has done its job, the human did not.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Atlassian: The token-management surface is on Atlassian’s profile page, not Jira itself:
https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/security/api-tokens
This page lists every Atlassian API token attached to the user’s account, with name, last-used timestamp, and TTL. The token Vortex IQ uses appears with the name set at connector setup (default Vortex IQ Connector). The Atlassian page shows TTL in absolute terms (e.g. Expires 26 Mar 2026); this card converts that to a remaining-days countdown. Why our number may legitimately differ from Atlassian’s display: Cross-connector reconciliation:

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why does the token expire at all? Can I make it permanent? Atlassian Cloud tokens have a maximum TTL of 1 year for security reasons (Atlassian Cloud security baseline, no override available). Self-hosted Jira Server / Data Center allows infinite-TTL Personal Access Tokens, but that’s not the typical Vortex IQ deployment. The 1-year cycle is a feature, not a bug, it forces a periodic credential audit. My token expires in 4 days but it’s the weekend. Can I rotate Monday? Technically yes (4 days > 0), but the safer pattern is to rotate the moment the alert fires. Atlassian periodically pushes early-expiry events for tokens that haven’t been used in 14+ days, the displayed TTL is not always the actual TTL. Rotate when prompted. The card says expired but Vortex IQ is still creating tickets. How? Most likely cause is a stale poll, the card hasn’t refreshed since you rotated. Wait 60 minutes for the next poll, or click Refresh now on the card. Less likely: Atlassian sometimes honours a brief grace period (typically 24h) on expired tokens for operations in flight; the card cannot see that grace. What’s the difference between a Personal Access Token and an OAuth flow? Personal Access Tokens (PATs) are simpler and more common; they’re long-lived, scoped to a user, and revocable from Atlassian’s profile page. OAuth 2.0 flows require an Atlassian-registered app and use refresh-token rotation, more complex but better for multi-tenant SaaS. Vortex IQ supports both. PATs are the default; switch to OAuth in Settings → Connectors → Jira → Auth Method if you operate multiple Vortex IQ tenants on a single Atlassian account. I rotated the token but dispatch is still failing. What now? Five-minute checklist. (1) Click Test connection on the connector page, the API call returns the specific error code. (2) Verify the token’s user has Browse Projects, Create Issues, Edit Issues, Add Comments permissions on the destination project. (3) Verify the custom field Vortex IQ Finding ID exists and is on the project’s issue-create screen. (4) Check Rate-Limit Exhausted, the rotation may have triggered a stampede that’s being throttled. (5) If still failing, the new token may be missing a scope, regenerate with the Default scope, do not select narrower scopes. Does this card track every Atlassian token I have, or just the one Vortex IQ uses? Just the one Vortex IQ uses. If your team has 50 Atlassian tokens for various integrations, this card only watches the one configured in the Vortex IQ connector. The Atlassian profile page is the source of truth for the full list. Why do I need to rotate manually? Can Vortex IQ rotate automatically? Atlassian’s API token endpoint requires the user’s browser-session for POST /tokens, there’s no API for programmatic creation. The merchant must click through the Atlassian token-creation UI. Vortex IQ deep-links to the right screen and pre-fills the recommended name to make it 90 seconds of work, but the human step is mandatory. OAuth 2.0 flows do auto-refresh, switch to OAuth if rotation friction is recurring. The alert window is 7 days. Can I make it 14 or 30? Yes, in Settings → Alerts → Jira Token Expiry. The default 7-day threshold is calibrated for typical merchant ops cadence; teams that handle credential rotations on monthly tickets often prefer 30 days of advance warning. The trade-off: longer windows mean amber-state for longer, with potential alert fatigue. My token was revoked by my Atlassian site admin during a security audit. What happens? The card flips to expired (critical) within an hour. Dispatch silently fails. Coordinate with the admin to issue a replacement, then click Rotate token and paste the new value. Audit findings filed during the outage queue and dispatch on resume; nothing is lost, but Critical Findings Without a Jira Ticket will fire on day 7 of the outage if not resolved.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Atlassian Token Expiry Imminent is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Jira and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.