Consolidation of two Jira instances - best practices

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi,

I'm conducting research about consolidation of two (large) Jira (ideally DC) instances together.

Overall, I wasn't able to find much information about the topic. There are some documents provided by Atlassian, where the information how to technically do it can be found.

But what I have in my mind is something more practical based on the experience of the users, who already did this kind of migration.

Is here anyone who would be kind enough to share some details of their use case?

Which problems you were facing? What went well, what not? What would you recommend to do and what not?

How it is going after the consolidation? What changed for you and your users? How the users were reacting?

Thank you!

[Aaron Geister]

I can try to shed some light on the workings of such migration. 

So for the most part I handle these as the same as a single migration. The one thing I can typically say is that the post migration effort will be big and take time. 

each instance is its own living ways of working. They will probably not have a lot in common and use different apps, users, amount of dat. The complexity will come from how different they are and what they want out of the consolidation of two unique instances into one site. 

since the end of life of server the upgrade to dc license is a much and can only be pushed out up to 90 days I believe but if you work with Atlassian you might be able to get dual licensing for dc and cloud. This could help with migration time so you don’t have to pack it into a small timeline. 

The two biggest parts of this will be the evaluation and or discovery analysis will be very important to find all the issues you may face. Example is apps that don’t migrate or are hard to migrate. Also how many products you migrate can add time and complexity. 
Next will be the sooner you do a test migration from sandbox or test instance to cloud sandbox the more you can evaluate what works and did t work to crafted a run-sheet for production. Migration. 

This also gives you time to see if fixing macros or broke Links will work self served. 

each migration big or small has its issues and we typically work through them best from early test migrations. This helps to formulate what the final migration is or will be like. 

The last part is to see during this consolidation what needs to be cleaned up after like custom field duplications, screens, schemes, and workflows. What type of standards you want to put in place post migration.  

I hope this helps a little. Two instances to one cloud site can be difficult but cleaning up in cloud will be better than trying to clean up on premise. 

Respectfully, 

Aaron

[Hana Kučerová]

Thank you, @Aaron Geister 

[Dave Liao]

+1 to what Aaron said, focusing on the ways of working for the teams involved, then picking the best workflows as targets, this will help with how your stakeholders align during a migration.

Are you migrating the two Jira instances to a new Jira DC instance, or migrating data from one Jira to the other existing Jira instance?

To help with the practical steps of migrating data between Jira instances, I recommend using a tool like Power Admin.

If you're lucky enough to have a technically-proficient team where you can develop your own in-house bespoke migration tools, that's always an option too... 😉

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Dave Liao ,

thank you.

We are migrating data from one Jira to the other existing Jira.

[Hana Kučerová]

Hi @Dave Liao ,

our use case is very complex. We have two large Jira instances with hundreds of projects and thousands of users. There are many apps and a lot of custom development too. From the analysis we already know it will be very problematic and this also means expensive. This is the reason we are trying to get in touch with somebody with similar situation.