Large scale JIRA consolidation

[Taylor Huston]

I'm a JIRA Admin that's recently been tasked with a fairly large projects. I am working with a company that has approximately 17-20 different JIRA instances across their organization. Some Server (at varying versions, some as old as 6.4), some Cloud. I have been asked to consolidate all of them into a shiny new JIRA Data Center instance.

I think I have a pretty solid game-plan based on the official documentation and my own experiences, but I've never personally done something at quite this scale, so I am more than open to any input or tips from other people who might have. Things I should look out for, edge cases I may not have thought of, etc.

We will be making liberal use of https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.awnaba.projectconfigurator.projectconfigurator/server/overview to handle the project exports and imports.

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

This sounds challenging - do keep us informed on how you go about it and challenges you face. We'd be watching this post here for sometime I bet. :-)

I'm excited to learn quite a lot from this experience of yours.

One question though - are you planning to consolidate all 17-20 of them into one instance now ? 

[Taylor Huston]

Not all in one day or anything, but eventually they will all be in the same Data Center instance.

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

Right - so are they all running same JIRA type or is that also varying , say some just on JSD , some just on Core , some on Software, some running all three in one instance ? Or is the use uniform ?

[Taylor Huston]

Most are Software, I don't think there are any SD instances, but we are still trying to track them all down and who exactly owns them, etc.

[Bianka Banova]

Hi Taylor,

Our team recently completed a similar effort for Johnson & Johnson - we consolidated 15 instances into a Data Center (it is quite shiny, to be honest :D).

I'm not gonna lie - this is a challenging endeavor. We are currently making a case study with them, and looking back at the entire process - it was quite the journey! Also - even if the consolidation goes relatively smoothly, you'd need to set some maintenance & governance criteria in place, otherwise that shiny new Data Center can become a nightmare to manage.

We used Configuration Manager for Jira for the bulk of the work, but if you wanna know more details - ping me at bianka.banova@botronsoft.com and me or someone from the team can give you some pointers at how to go about this. 

Also...good luck. I mean it :-)