What is best practice for cleaning up filters and dashboards

Question

Our instance has over 2000 of each.  What do other admin do to try and clean up ones that aren't used, etc?  Or are there suggested ways to keep it from getting this bad?  Our users saw they could create both on their own and seem to have gotten carried away considering the # of users we have.

Another issue has anyone found away to always have an admin group added/included as an editor?

Martin _Wayflare_ · Answer

A few months late to this one, but a cleanup this size is rarely done quickly, so hopefully still useful. Two different jobs are tangled together here, and it helps to split them.

The bulk of it is finding and retiring unused filters and dashboards. That part is governance rather than tooling, and you're most of the way there: the filter export you've already pulled is the foundation, and the deadline-then-delete approach Susan suggested is the right shape for the rest. The hard part is the bit you flagged, usage. Jira Cloud's REST API doesn't give you a clean "last viewed" per filter or dashboard, so "unused" mostly has to be inferred from things like no favourites, no subscriptions, owner long gone, not on any board. There's no delete-unused button, it ends up being an inventory plus a policy. For always keeping an admin group as editor: on Cloud you can add edit permissions to dashboards in bulk with PUT /rest/api/3/dashboard/bulk/edit (the changePermission action with extendAdminPermissions). It caps at roughly 100 per call, so batch it for a couple thousand. For filters it's per item under Settings > System > Shared items.

The smaller sub-problem is items still owned by people who've left. Deactivating someone doesn't transfer their filters or dashboards, they keep belonging to the inactive account. Natively that's the Shared items screen (per item), or REST: PUT /rest/api/3/filter/{id}/owner for filters, and the changeOwner action on dashboard/bulk/edit for dashboards.

Disclosure: I build a Forge app in this space ("Leaver Cleanup & Owner Reassignment for Jira", by Wayflare), so I'm not neutral. To be clear about scope, it does not do the unused-cleanup part. It doesn't find dead filters or delete anything. It covers the second job for one departed user at a time: reassign their filters, issues (assignee and reporter), and component and project leads in one pass, with a CSV of what moved. Dashboards are out of scope in it too, so for the dashboard half you'd stay on Shared items or the REST call above. If a chunk of your 2,000 are stuck on people who've left, it might save you the scripting for that slice. For the decluttering itself, the inventory-and-deadline approach is the job.

Happy to share the REST export snippets if you go that route.

Susan Waldrip · Answer

Hi @Julie Beltz , sorry for the delay! Yes, unfortunately I think Rovo means a visual cross-check. Unless you are a programming whiz (or know someone) who can code something in Python/other to cross-check for you. I am not such a being!

If you find any helpful steps or methods to doing this and are up for posting them here, that would be helpful!

Julie Beltz · Answer

Thanks!  I've got spreadsheet of all the filter data.  The part I'm missing is trying to determine if a filter is used on a board or dashboard.  When Rovo says cross check does it mean manually checking?