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Connect Jira Cloud to Athena so each member can search issues, read tickets and comments, and explore projects as their own Atlassian identity. Jira project permissions and issue-level security apply unchanged — Athena sees exactly what you can see in Jira, and nothing is shared through a service account or personal access token.
Setup is two steps, done by two different people: your Atlassian administrator registers an OAuth app in the Atlassian developer console, then an Athena workspace admin saves that app once for the whole workspace. Members can only connect after both are done. The Jira integration is currently in an admin-only rollout — contact team@athenaintel.com to enable it for your workspace.

Step 1 — Register an OAuth app in Atlassian (Atlassian admin)

One app registration serves every user and every Jira site in your organization — Atlassian resolves which site a request targets at runtime.
  1. Open developer.atlassian.com → your profile icon → Developer consoleCreateOAuth 2.0 integration. Name it e.g. Athena.
  2. When asked about the grant type, choose account-level grants (not resource-restricted). A member’s single consent can then cover several Jira sites, and re-connecting adds new sites to the same grant. This choice is made at creation and cannot be changed later.
  3. Permissions — add both the Jira API and the User Identity API, then enable these scopes:
    read:me lets Athena identify who connected; offline_access keeps the connection alive without re-prompting members. Atlassian forces every member to re-consent if the scope set changes later, which is why the full set is requested up front — write access stays gated inside Athena until write features are enabled.
  4. Authorization → Configure — set the callback URL:
    For private/VPC deployments, replace api.athenaintel.com with your environment’s Athena API host. Atlassian requires an exact match; if the console only accepts one callback URL, register a separate app per Athena environment.
  5. Distribution → Enable sharing and complete the form (vendor details and a privacy-policy URL). Without sharing, only the app’s creator can connect — everyone else gets an Atlassian error. Until the app passes Atlassian’s optional review, members see a “not yet reviewed by Atlassian” note on the consent screen; that’s expected for private integrations.
  6. From Settings, copy the Client ID and Secret and hand them to your Athena workspace admin through a secure channel.
If your Atlassian organization uses the “Block user apps” security control, an Atlassian org admin must authorize the app (Atlassian Administration → Apps → Connected apps) before members can consent — otherwise the consent screen shows an admin-approval notice and never returns to Athena.

Step 2 — Enable Jira in Athena (workspace admin, once)

Open Workspace Settings → Treasury → Integrations and add a new integration: Leaving scopes empty in the config uses Athena’s defaults (the set from step 1.3). Enable the integration and save. Secrets are encrypted at rest and never returned to the browser.

Step 3 — Connect your account (each member)

  1. Navigate to Integrations and click Connect on the Jira (Direct OAuth) card.
  2. A popup opens Atlassian’s consent screen. Pick your Jira site and approve. Athena custodies your encrypted tokens server-side and automatically registers every Jira site in your grant — there is no picker step.
  3. Have more than one Jira site? Click Connect again and select the next site — Atlassian adds it to your existing grant.
Once connected, the Jira toolkit lets agents search issues with JQL, read issues and their comments, list your projects, and inspect workflow transitions. Every Jira tool asks for your approval before it runs.

Token lifecycle & troubleshooting

  • Everything is per-user. Results always reflect your Jira permissions, and any future writes are attributed to you.
  • “Jira authentication failed — reconnect.” Atlassian invalidates connections after 90 days of inactivity, on password changes, on SSO migrations, and when you revoke access at id.atlassian.com → Connected apps. Reconnecting from the Integrations page fixes all of these.
  • Missing results from some projects? Atlassian data-security policies can block apps from specific projects — content from those projects is silently filtered rather than surfaced as an error. Check with your Atlassian admin.
  • Removed a site from your grant? Athena automatically retires that site’s connection; re-consenting for the site restores it.