Seeking Recommendations: Performance Monitoring and Alerting Tools for Jira Cloud

[Bhanu Prakash Ketha]

Hi Community members,

I'm currently exploring options for performance monitoring and alerting tools within our Jira Cloud environment, and I'd greatly appreciate your insights and recommendations.

Background:

We're migrating from Jira Data Center (DC) to Jira Cloud, and we're looking to replicate some of the performance monitoring capabilities we had in DC. In Jira DC, Atlassian provides built-in tools like:

• Apdex logs
• JQL Monitoring tools
• REST resources and Servlets monitoring
• Jira Automation Monitoring

These tools helped us proactively identify and address performance bottlenecks.

The Challenge:

We're finding it challenging to find equivalent solutions in Jira Cloud. We've explored a few options, including Dynatrace, but their capabilities seem limited for our specific needs.

Our Requirements:

Ideally, we're looking for a tool (or combination of tools) that can provide insights into the performance of major Jira Cloud modules, including:

• Overall Site Performance: General responsiveness and uptime.
• Module-Specific Performance: Identifying specific areas impacting performance.
• Jira Dashboard Performance: Load times and rendering efficiency.
• Jira Filter Performance: Execution times and resource consumption.
• Project Load Times: How quickly projects load and render.
• Issue Metrics: Data on issue creation, resolution, and transition times.
• Comment Load Times: Performance related to displaying comments on issues.
• App Performance: Monitoring the impact of installed apps on overall Jira performance.
• REST API Monitoring: Tracking API response times and error rates. We heavily rely on the Jira REST API for integrations.
• Automation Rule Monitoring: Performance and success rates of Jira Automation rules. We have a large number of automation rules, and their performance is critical.

Technical Details (Potentially Relevant):

• Our Jira Cloud instance has approximately >5000 users.
• We have a large number of projects (>1000).
• We use a variety of Jira apps, including Script Runner, Rich Filters, etc...
• We heavily utilize the Jira REST API for integrations with other systems.

Specific Questions:

1. Are there any built-in Jira Cloud features (beyond the standard audit logs) that provide performance monitoring data?
2. What third-party tools have you found effective for monitoring Jira Cloud performance, particularly in the areas listed above?
3. Do you have any recommendations for setting up custom monitoring solutions using the Jira Cloud REST API?
4. Are there any specific Jira Cloud apps known for providing detailed performance metrics?
5. How do you monitor the performance of Jira Automation rules in Jira Cloud?

Any insights, recommendations, or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated! We're eager to learn from the community's expertise.

Thanks in advance,

Bhanu

[Sunny Ape]

In support of what @John Funk said, even if you were able to gather all this data, and, after analysing it, you determined some aspect of the performance was below what you wanted, there is nothing you could do about that anyway,... it's a SaaS product; you can't buy or create more performance anyhow, because it's already going as fast as the vendor and deployment platform can make it go.

[John Funk]

100%

[John Funk]

Hi Bhanu - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I guess my first question is what are you hoping to gather from this. Are you really doing this exercise to decide whether you are going to migrate from Data Center to Cloud? If not, then the exercise is pretty much useless in my opinion. Even then, it's probably useless. Jira Cloud has been established and operation for more than a dozen years. You rarely if ever see major complaints about performance. I have certainly seen way more as to Data Center than Cloud. 

The next point is that Jira Cloud is a major SAAS application. Would you do something like this before moving to Salesforce? Microsoft 365? Slack? AWS? I think you probably see my point. 

Personally, I think you are wasting your time trying to determine all of this. You have plenty of criteria to use to determine if you want to go to Cloud or not - but for me, performance wouldn't even be in the top 10. 

[Sunny Ape]

.

[Bhanu Prakash Ketha]

Great! Yes, I agree with everything you've said and much more.

All we want is to be proactive and receive alerts about performance issues or module malfunctions before our customers inform us. Lot of times what's happening is that we are getting reports that Jira Cloud is slow and broken modules often from our customers and I kind of don't like that, I'd like for it to be other way around, I want to know any issues with the application being the Application Administrator and inform the users about the issue before they report it to us.

To achieve this, I'd like to find a solution, if one exists, and if any of the members came across that's a better fit for Jira Cloud than the alternatives. Upon research, found many SaaS application monitoring tools available (like NewRelic, Dynatrace, Datadog, and even custom built solutions using combination of tools like Jenkins and other monitoring tools, though those aren't very elegant solutions...). I would like to know from the community if anyone came across these scenarios and suggest any tools that are a good fit for Jira Cloud is all.

Thank you so much for keeping up with the post and taking the time to respond. 

Bhanu

[Bhanu Prakash Ketha]

Hi @John Funk / @Sunny Ape 

Thank you for your perspectives and for welcoming me to the community. I appreciate you both taking the time to respond.

I understand your points about Jira Cloud being a SaaS solution and that we will not be able to do anything about the underlying infrastructure. I also acknowledge that performance issues are less common in Jira cloud than in Jira Data Center.

Our goal is to proactively monitor and identify any potential performance bottlenecks within our specific usage patterns and configurations on Jira cloud. I believe that performance monitoring can help us with the following:

1. Optimize our workflows and configurations - By identifying slow running JQL queries, poorly created automation rules, and apps with poor performance, we can adjust our internal process and configs to ensure overall efficiency.
2. Manage user expectations - If we anticipate potential performance issues (e.g. during peak times) we can inform users proactively and manage their expectations.
3. Identify poor performing apps and integrations - We have lot of apps and integartions including 3rd party integrations, monitoring for performance would help us pinpoint to the solutions that are negatively impacting us.
4. Provide data-driven feedback to Atlassian Support - Having this data about performance bottlenecks will help provide effective and accurate feedback to Atlassian support which can help with the future improvements.

We believe that proactive approach to performance monitoring is essential for ensuring a positive experience in Jira cloud.

Given this context, I am still interested in exploring tools and techniques for monitoring Jira Cloud Performance, particularly in the areas outlined in my original post:

1. Identifying and optimizing slow running Jira Filter Queries
2. Automation Rule performance monitoring beyond just success and failure rates
3. Pinpointing apps and integrations that are causing performance issues in cloud.

Any insights you share, even within the constraints of SaaS environment, would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again for your input.

Bhanu

[John Funk]

Again, I don't worry about performance with Jira Cloud. If things get slow it's usually across the board for multiple customers and everyone knows it that is affected by it. 

To me the single biggest thing you can do is limit the number of custom fields that are created - to a certain extent (don't be a jerk about it, but don't 1,000 custom fields either). And make sure that as many as are possible to have a least one project and/or issue type associated with the field in the field Context. 

As far as slow running Jira Filter queries - I don't see much of this either. If you are really worried about it, create a CAB or some type of approval that must review and approval complicated queries. They you work on the performance up front instead of after that fact. 

[Bhanu Prakash Ketha]

Great! Yes, I agree with everything you've said and much more.

All we want is to be proactive and receive alerts about performance issues or module malfunctions before our customers inform us. Lot of times what's happening is that we are getting reports that Jira Cloud is slow and broken modules often from our customers and I kind of don't like that, I'd like for it to be other way around, I want to know any issues with the application being the Application Administrator and inform the users about the issue before they report it to us.

To achieve this, I'd like to find a solution, if one exists, and if any of the members came across that's a better fit for Jira Cloud than the alternatives. Upon research, found many SaaS application monitoring tools available (like NewRelic, Dynatrace, Datadog, and even custom built solutions using combination of tools like Jenkins and other monitoring tools, though those aren't very elegant solutions...). I would like to know from the community if anyone came across these scenarios and suggest any tools that are a good fit for Jira Cloud is all.

Thank you so much for keeping up with the post and taking the time to respond. 

Bhanu