Are there known issues with connecting an instance of Bamboo to multiple instances of JIRA?

[Matt Martin]

Hey there,

• We have two server instances of JIRA and currently a single instance of DC Bamboo.
• Bamboo is already app linked to JIRA instance A
• We would also like Bamboo to be concurrently app linked to JIRA instance B

It definitely seems achievable however, when I was doing a search for whether there are known issues with this, I found an article suggesting that Bamboo requires the connected JIRA instances to have no duplicate project keys. 

After checking, we have 20 duplicate project keys in our instances and it's going to be a decently significant hassle to resolve this, as such, I wanted to know if this is a real issue and also, why doesn't Bamboo validate connected instances like the other apps (which seems to be qualification of what instance it wants to talk to first before trying to interact).

Thanks for your help!

[Daniel Santos · Accepted solution]

Hi @Matt Martin,

Short answer

Don't link a Bamboo instance with two different Jira instances.

Long answer

Although the linking feature works when Bamboo is connected to two Jira instances, this configuration will create confusion for your team.

As you already noticed from other threads there are some issues here related to projects with the same key.

Let's think in the following example:

• Jira A has issues: AAA-1, YYY-1.
• Jira B has issues: BBB-1, YYY-1, and YYY-2.
• Assume Jira A is the primary

If you create a commit where the message has the issue "AAA-1, YYY-2, and BBB-1", this is what you will get from Bamboo:

• Will create a link to AAA-1 (Jira A).
• Will create a broken link to YYY-2 (Jira A) - It knows the project YYY exists in Jira A and therefore creates the link even if the issue is not present.
• Will create a link to BBB-1 (Jira B).

From Jira A you will see:

• The issue AAA-1 will have a build associated with it

From Jira B you will see:

• The issue BBB-1 will have a build associated with it.
• The issue YYY-2 will have a build associated with it (which you will probably not expect). Jira is able to see that there is a build with that key and it shows it.

The example above is just to confirm that if you want this configuration you should never have the same project key in both Jira instances. As you know this is not an easy task and may create some confusion. I believe the best approach here is to have two distinct Bamboo instances, one connected to each Jira.

To provide the information above I've run some tests on Bamboo 6.8.x connected to Jira 8.0.x.

This is one issue already open to reporting improvements in this area: [BAM-18727] Improve the way we generate links between Jira issues and build results.

I hope that helps to clarify this scenario.