Getting insights from your Jira Data Center instance from Support Zip files

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Hello Atlassian Community,

I'm Thiago Masutti, a Premier Support Engineer at Atlassian. I assist customers with our on-premise products like Jira and Confluence.

At Atlassian, our developers dedicate significant effort to creating tools that empower support engineers to provide exceptional service to our customers. One such tool is the Support Zip, which consolidates application logs and various metrics essential for troubleshooting. This makes it easier for administrators to share crucial data with Atlassian Support.

We frequently request Support Zip files from customers because they contain vital information needed to address nearly any issue.

As deployments grow in size and complexity, so do the challenges associated with them. Having efficient tools to swiftly navigate important data benefits both administrators and support engineers.

Today, I want to share with you JAGS, a tool developed by Atlassian support engineers. JAGS stands for "Just Another Graphing Solution" and helps visualize insights from Support Zip files, particularly data from Jira Data Center logs.

If your organization heavily relies on Jira, it's crucial to have your own observability stack to continuously collect telemetry data and proactively monitor your deployment's infrastructure and application. For those who don't yet have such a stack, JAGS can be a helpful tool, though it will not replace a comprehensive observability solution.

Enough reading, let's see some visuals!
Here are some screenshots of the tool's visualization capabilities.

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Initial dashboard with details about Support Zip files that are being parsed.

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Jira main dashboard with important performance metrics for a glance on the instance health.
It also has links to all built-in dashboards based on metrics available on the application logs.

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Dashboard with database performance metrics

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Dashboard with stuck threads reported on the Tomcat logs.

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Where can I get it?

The code and instructions to set up the stack are available at  https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/KB/JAGS.
Note that JAGS is not officially supported and is shared as-is.

Thank you for reading, and feel free to reach out with any questions or feedback!

Kind regards,
Thiago Masutti
Premier Support Engineer | Atlassian

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Thank you for sharing, @Thiago Masutti. I'm working for a marketplace partner and I'll make sure to share this also with our support teams. Sometimes, they also get support.zips and this might be useful in the analysis process.

[Raúl Carrera López]

Thank you so much @Thiago Masutti

This is an incredible contribution, I have asked support many times to provide us or point us to a tool that makes it easier to gather and consolidate information from the support zips.

I saw this as something very necessary for both parties because some tickets could be avoided with something like this.

I’m going to test it right away. Once again, thank you!

[vbo]

The setup work nicely.
making it available is good move (and can also take some load from Atlassian support).
thank you for sharing.

[Fernando Calvo García]

Hi, 

the link is broken: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/KB/JAGS

Regards,

Fernando

[Darren Shinkins]

Hi everyone! 

Attempting to set this up for the first time. I've managed to get grafana to run, but I'm getting no data. 

I'm seeing this error message in all panels:

"You do not currently have a default database configured for this data source. Postgres requires a default database in which to connect. Please configure one through the Data Sources Configuration page, or if you are using a provisioning file, update that configuration file with a default database."

Has anyone else come across this? If so, could you share any troubleshooting advice?

Thanks

[Darren Shinkins]

Re my last comment.

Loads of other stuff going on with this, but the above was reasonably straightforward at least.

Database is configured correctly and everything connects OK. Appears to be some sort of race condition on grafana startup when it tests connections.

On grafana, navigating to connections, then data sources, then ahm_jags loads the expected database configuration. Pressing save and test confirms the database connection is OK, and the above error clears.

It is replaced by other errors that appear to indicate that there is no data, but working through those next :)