Problem

During migration of projects from Jira Server/Data-Center to Jira Cloud the migration fails with a similar message:

Create of user '<USER_NAME>' with id/key '<USER_KEY>' on the source system failed with the following error: 'Failed to add user'

During the same operation a similar exception can be found in the Jira log (support.zip):

DefaultDispatcher-worker-1 ERROR admin 946x2203x1 h8ja8y 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 /rest/cloud-migration-tool/1.0/migrations/ceec550c-4c6a-48b3-a42d-9eb8044de842/provisioning [c.b.j.c.impl.operations.AbstractMigrationOperation] Unable to perform migration operation
com.botronsoft.jira.cloudmigrator.impl.errorhandling.CloudOperationException: Create of user 'admin' with id/key 'admin' on the source system failed with the following error: 'Failed to add user'.
 at com.botronsoft.jira.cloudmigrator.impl.operations.deployment.WaitForDeployConfigurationStep.getFailureException(WaitForDeployConfigurationStep.kt:44)
...

Reason

Jira Cloud is refusing to create the user as found on the source system (same name and email address).

Troubleshooting

Try to create the same user by hand logged in as the same user who runs the migration. The user that runs the migration is the one who's API token is used to create the connection to Jira Cloud.

If you are not able to create the user manually check your permissions or create a new connection using user with the site admin permissions.

Solution

You have two options:

1. Create the user by hand (is possible) and run the migration again. The new migration will detect the user as existing and no new user will be created.
2. Use User Mapping functionality. You can either map the user to a new one with different email which will also require a new user to be created during migration or by matching it to an existing user on the cloud instance.