The latest Jira Long Term Support releases are here

[#1]

In case you missed it: In July, we renamed Enterprise releases to Long Term Support releases and expanded our security bug fix policy. We will continue to backport critical security bug fixes and now when architecturally possible we will also backport all other security bug fixes to Long Term Support releases.

G’day Jira Community!

We’re pleased to inform you that the Jira Software 8.13 and Jira Service Desk 4.13 Long Term Support (LTS) releases are now available. As a refresher, LTS releases receive backported critical security and product bug fixes, and when architecturally possible, all other security bug fixes throughout their two-year standard support window. This long-term support makes LTS releases ideal for those of you with highly complex instances who can’t perform a major feature upgrade more than once a year.

Keep reading for highlights of what we’ve shipped since the last Jira LTS releases and resources to make your upgrade a success (including how to best make use of Zero Downtime Upgrades for those of you on Data Center).

What you’re getting

We know that many of you on Jira Software 8.5 and Jira Service Desk 4.5 (the previous Jira LTS release versions) have been eager to take advantage of all the goodness we’ve been rolling out. And we don’t think you’ll be disappointed-- here are some highlights of improvements and new features we’ve released since 8.5/4.5:

Enterprise enhancements for Data Center

Performance, reliability, and scale

• Rate limiting improves instance stability, performance, and helps instances self-protect

• Cluster monitoring improvements including the ability to view the custom fields that take the longest to index and the automatic removal of stale nodes

• Optimized custom fields reduce the number of called field indexers which can negatively impact performance and indexing time

• Document-Based Replication (DBR) makes your cluster more stable and provides reliable consistency of data across each node in the cluster; changes in the index are propagated faster and more reliably between nodes, streamlining collaboration for users

Compliance and user management

• Advanced auditing provides new capabilities and more comprehensive event tracking which gives you the visibility and security-relevant digital records needed to help demonstrate compliance, strengthen security, and improve workflow

• Anonymize users with just a few clicks to stay compliant with GDPR (also available on Server)

• OpenID Connect enables seamless integration with 3rd party identity providers

• Just-in-time user provisioning (JIT provisioning) allows users to be created and updated automatically when they log in through SAML SSO or OpenID Connect (OIDC) SSO

Features galore

Agile at scale (Jira Software)

• New sprint permissions allow for more granularity and enable you to assign tasks to specific users

• Assign dates for future sprints to help you improve your sprint planning over time

• Refreshed velocity chart that shows up to 120 sprints, lets you choose a pre-defined timeframe or custom date range, shows the average velocity of your team, and has a new look-and-feel with cool features like focus that lets you zoom in on the right sprint

• Burnup charts to keep teams on track with a visual representation of a sprint’s scope and identify problems such as scope creep

Improved queues and integrations (Jira Service Desk)

• Manage issues at once with bulk actions to save yourself time

• Improved sorting makes it easier to find the most important issues, and new keyboard shortcuts let you quickly switch between issues

• New REST APIs for managing agent queues outside of the UI

• Opsgenie integration with Jira Service Desk lets you set up incident management for individual projects, allowing agents to view ongoing incidents, create new ones to alert the Opsgenie teams right away, and link incidents to related requests to give everyone involved more context

• Confluence Cloud integration enables those of you with Confluence Cloud to use it as your knowledge base

General improvements

Support for modern platforms and databases

• PostSQL 10 support

• PostSQL 11 support

• MySQL 8 support

• OAuth 2.0 for your mail server

Accessibility

• Personalized accessibility settings that make it easier to work with Jira, with options to:

  • Underline all links around Jira to make them more visible

  • Add unique patterns to issue status to distinguish between them more easily

  • Increase text spacing between characters, words, lines of text, and paragraphs

  • Add a gray background to subtle buttons (normally displayed on hover) to make them more prominent

Helpful resources & tips

Not sure where to begin? Here are a few resources to help you prepare for your upgrade:

• Pre-upgrade planning tool
• Jira Software 8.13 change log
• Jira Software 8.13 release notes

Reminder: You’ll need to upgrade Jira Service Desk at the same time.

• Jira Service Desk 4.13 change log

• Jira Service Desk 4.13 release notes

Pro-tip: move to 8.13/4.13 with zero downtime* (Data Center)

If you’re running Jira Data Center in a clustered environment, we recommend you take advantage of zero downtime upgrades so your team can upgrade during whatever timeframe that works best for them, without interrupting users. Check out this guide for step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade with zero downtime.

*Zero downtime upgrade is not available when upgrading from Jira 7.x to Jira 8.x.

We hope this post helped prepare you for your upgrade (and got you excited). Feel free to share any questions or comments in the Comments section below!

[Rich Reamer]

Tried upgrading to this 4.13 release from the 4.5.8 version. Using "mysqld Ver 5.7.31 for Linux on x86_64 (MySQL Community Server (GPL))" and mysql-connector-java-5.1.49-bin.jar.

it starts up but tells me "We can't tell what database you're using". Whats wrong? Is 5.7.x not actually supported verses 4.5.8 which has no issues with this database.

[Artur Gniadzik]

Hi @Rich Reamer,
MySQL 5.7 is still officially supported by Jira. The issue you are describing may be caused by using mysql as a <database-type> in dbconfig.xml which was previously used for MySQL 5.6 (not supported anymore). For MySQL 5.7.x it should be mysql57 and for MySQL 8.0 it should be mysql8.
Please take a look at https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiraserver/connecting-jira-applications-to-mysql-5-7-966063305.html for the details on how to configure the MySQL 5.7.x DB connection.
And looking at the documentation I think we haven't make it clear that it's important to use a proper database-type when it comes to connecting to MySQL (and to check if you use a proper one when upgrading).

[Rich Reamer]

Wow Artur, nice find !! -- Getting farther -- (now getting The database setup is not supporting utf8mb4 -- but I will work through that)

And YES -- the whole "<database-type>" thing is NOT documented well at all.

Thank you very much/

[Taranjeet Singh]

Thanks for sharing the news and useful information for upgrading to latest Jira LTS release versions!

[Rich Reamer]

Yeah, now after everythings been upgraded and working wqell -- were gonna start looking into dumping Jira prolly mid 2021 since they are stopping their self server program.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

What is the next step ?

[Rich Reamer]

Well havent started looking yet for self hosting platform as yet, to convert to.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

@Rich Reamer do you mean for scaling?

[Rich Reamer]

@Gonchik Tsymzhitov- oh no .. to dump this product and migrate. We cannot do Cloud.

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

@Rich Reamer  Do you have some reasonable alternatives? how many active user licenses do you have ?

I just collecting the situations what type companies are migrating. Actually, 250 user license tier for DC will help to for Atlassian at the moment, from >350 companies data stats

[Rich Reamer]

@Gonchik Tsymzhitovwe have like a dozen ticket handlers / schedulers and like 160+ or so end user ticket submitters.

No alternatives at present, will start researching in like 3 or 4 months.