Missing details in issue history log

[Heiko Nigmann]

Hello community,

we actually have the problem, that the details in some issues are missing. In some projects since created in May 2021 or in September 2020. It's different from project to project.

So in this examlpe there is no entry about Field, Original Value and New Value or the described "made changes".

What's the problem? Is it only a view problem or did me lost the history details?

Thanks a lot!

Heiko

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That does look odd.

It could well be a display issue, I would want to try viewing with another browser and from another computer.  I'd also want a quick look from the point of view of another user - there are a couple of apps which can hide the issue history for security reasons.

If you can rule all of those out, then my next check would be trying to read the history over the REST API, and if that's blank, finally check in the database for the lines.

If there's genuinely nothing there, then you've got a problem with something failing to write, or even destroying your history.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok.  There is no code in Jira that deletes entries from the issue history except as part of the process of deleting an entire issue (which would have removed a lot more than just the history)

I can't find any record of a bug that would do this either.

So, it has either been done by a human hacking your database, or you have installed an app that destroyed bits of the history deliberately - there are some that do "anonymisation" or "data protection/gdpr" type stuff that can scrub bits of history, and, of course, if you install something like Scriptrunner, it is possible to script something that will do this sort of thing.

Anyway, restoration from XML is not going to be pretty.  There's no partial import from xml (as this sort of thing simply shouldn't be happening, there's no need to code for it), so you'll have to extract the data you want to replace from the XML and work out how to get it back into the database.

What I would be tempted to do is fire up an empty development Jira (with the same database behind it as production), import the xml backup, and that should leave the development database with all your missing lines.  That can then be used to easily identify and write the SQL to get the missing lines re-inserted into the production database.

Note that you should check the changeitem.id very carefully for clashes and make sure the restored ones do not clash or go outside their original range.

[Heiko Nigmann]

Thanks for your answers. We restored ~90.000 missing entries of tables "changegroup" and "changeitem".

But at the moment we don't know what or who deleted this entries...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Excellent!  To get them working in reports and JQL in full, you'll need to run a re-index over any issues that have had their history restored, but that's only needed to enable a few search type things.

As for who did it, you can narrow it down to someone with admin access (to install a plugin or run a script that could do the damage) or database access, and it may be worth a look through any access logs you have, but those are long shots.  When I've seen bad things like this done, I've always had the easy option of assuming "one of the admins who was here before me did it"

[Heiko Nigmann]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- I'm afraid, it is not a display issue. We checked our database table "changeitem" and noticed, that ~91681 entries are missing between 08/09/2020 and 15/06/2021!

What caused on ~15/06/2021 that Jira will delete all this entries back to September 2020? Is there a bug in V8.13.6?
We updated V8.13.6 on 15/11/2020.

Luckily we have some automatic backups of Jira. The problem is now, how can I import the missing entries from XML in MySQL Database?