What issues do you run into with your Jira instances?

Question

I'm working as an intern for a company that's creating a plugin to help keep Jira instances clean, and I wanted to ask some questions so that we can best help improve issues that people face inside their Jira instances.

How much time per week do you spend keeping your Jira instance clean?

How old is your oldest unresolved ticket?

What problems do you most frequently run into within your Jira instance?

Any answers to these questions or thoughts on what would help you with your Jira instance would be very appreciated!

Fabio Racobaldo _Catworkx_ · Answer

Hi @Jacob Baird and welcome,

I believe a Jira Admin spends at least 2-4 hours per week keeping the system clean (cleaning the instance makes the solution easier to maintain).

Some points of attention should be:
- Cleaning up unused schemes (including screens, workflows, field configuration)
- Rationalizing and optimizing custom fields. Fields with the same or similar names, unused custom fields, etc.
- Unresolved issues assigned to inactive users
- Filters/dashboards managed by inactive users
- Permission schemes containing groups or users
- Disabled or unused automations

Hope this helps,

Fabio

Arkadiusz Wroblewski · Answer

Hello and Welcome @Jacob Baird

From my side, the most common problems are usually not one big issue, but a lot of smaller things that grow over time.

What I run into most often are unused custom fields, old workflows nobody really owns anymore, filters and dashboards without clear ownership, and tickets that stay unresolved long after they stopped being real work.

Another big one is inconsistency. Different teams start using statuses, issue types, and request types in slightly different ways, and after some time the instance becomes harder to govern and report on cleanly.

So for me, “keeping Jira clean” is mostly about reducing configuration drift and improving ownership.

Ajay _view26_ · Answer

Hi @Jacob Baird

Welcome to the community!

A few of the most common “instance hygiene” problems I see are stale workflows/fields nobody owns anymore, dashboards and filters with unclear ownership, unresolved tickets that no longer represent real work, inconsistent request types/status usage across teams, and permission schemes that have grown organically and are hard to audit.

In most teams, the cleanup pain is less about one giant problem and more about small config drift over time. If your plugin helps identify unused fields, stale filters, orphaned dashboards, and aging unresolved issues with ownership suggestions, that would be genuinely useful.