4 tips for responsible scale with Jira Software

[#1]

Hello, Data Center Community,

My name is Mel, I’m part of the Data Center marketing team, and I know many of you rely on Jira Software to plan, track, and release work within your scaling organizations. I also know that it can be tough to scale your teams without getting bogged down by the growing amount of data you create in the process.

Check out these 4 tips on how to scale responsibly with Jira Software:

1. Use Guardrails to manage your instance

2. Archive unneeded data to keep Jira Software powerful

3. Automate as you scale with Automation for Jira

4. Keep your instance powerful with Safeguards

1. Use Guardrails to manage your instance

As your Jira Software instances grow, the associated data grows too, which can sometimes impact performance. To help you better plan for growth and responsibly manage your instance, we’ve introduced Guardrails for Jira Software. Guardrails help you understand the expected effects of growing data types, and offer the controls, insights, and capabilities you need to keep your data in line.

Guardrails are product-based documentation and strategic recommendations designed to educate you about the tipping point at which your Jira Software instance might start to experience performance impacts. The first version of published Guardrails includes 10+ data dimensions, including:

• Projects

• Comments

• Attachments

• And many more

Use these Guardrails to identify and mitigate scale risks as you make informed decisions about when, how, and where to clean up your instance. Learn more about Jira Software Guardrails.

2. Archive unneeded data to keep Jira powerful

As you review Guardrails, you may realize the best way to give your Jira Software instance a boost is to archive unused data you need to keep for compliance demands. Unneeded comments, issues, and projects can bog down your instance and slow load times. To keep that information for historical records, try archiving it rather than deleting it to improve the end-user experience. Learn how to archive a project, or discover how to bulk archive issues.

3. Automate as you scale with Automation for Jira

Scaling teams doesn’t have to mean more work for everyone. Starting in Jira Software 9.0, we’ve included Automation for Jira (A4J) as native functionality for Jira Software Data Center. This means you can now take advantage of great automation benefits such as:

• Synchronized parent and sub-tasks, smart auto-assigning, tracked SLAs, and automated acting on linked issues

• Smoothly automated advanced processes like approval workflows or defect management

• Seamless communication between separate instances and integration with other tools using available webhooks-based triggers

If you’ve not yet upgraded to Jira Software 9.0, you can access A4J as a free marketplace app. As long as you are on a supported Jira Data Center license, you can leverage A4J at no cost until you upgrade to Jira 9.0 or later. Learn more about Automation for Jira.

4. Keep your instance powerful with Safeguards

As you scale and automate your work, you may find yourself with lots of comments on an issue. Safeguards for comments help you moderate a bot account group’s activity by limiting the number of comments every account in that group can add to an issue. Safeguards will also alert you by email if the number of comments in an issue is approaching the limit (either default or custom), the limit has been reached, or the limit has been exceeded. If you define a moderated group in the settings, you will also start receiving notifications about certain activities having been blocked. Learn more about Safeguards for comments.

Similarly, indexing Safeguards help to alleviate pressure on the indexing queues. These Safeguards help you limit the number of issue-related entities that can be reindexed at a time. An update to our Jira indexing Safeguards modified the default behavior of change items indexing so that change items with unsupported fields are filtered out before they’re collected into change groups. As a result, when there’s a group of change items with unsupported fields only, it won’t be indexed, helping your instance perform its best.

I hope these tips helped you take advantage of our performance and scale features and get the most out of your Jira Software instance!