100 Custom Field and Clean up

[For Where]

I have more than 1000 Custom fields in Jira and need to delete some unused ones but want to confirm the best way of doing this in an automated way with out going through pages and pages of Custom fields looking at last used and what projects it is associated to manually.

This would be too tedious to do, any best practice of how to proceed with this sort of task. Jira Cloud it is.

[Tom Lister · Accepted solution]

Hi @For Where 

I don't know of a quick way to do this. You will have to do some analysis and planning - obvs.

Server was so much better at this as the custom field list showed the usage numbers for each field. Then you could relatively safely remove the unused fields. Although there was always a risk of there being references in filters and workflows.

You can start with JQL search for issues where value is not empty. If you get no results then you have an unused field from the issue point of view.

I think you'll have to buckle in for a long background cleanup task here - the admins life!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've done a lot of this in my career in the Atlassian ecosystem, and I have to say that I have never wanted to automate it. 

It is actually easier to write than you might expect, but you can't script 95% of the work.  For each field, you absolutely have to go to the owners of the data and ask if it's ok to kill it off.  You're going to need to look at each one to see how it is used, and who is using it, and talk to them about either deletion or merge.  Every field is likely to be different, and used by different people.

It's a slog, and something I never really solved properly (although I have asked the coders of our Microscope  report to see if they can add it.  Apologies for the advert there, it''s part of the job), but you will want to look at every field to see how it is used and then go talk to everyone who might have an interest in the data in it.

[Tom Lister]

Hi @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- 

As this is an obvious gap, I may look into a solution to this via REST API and maybe python to start off. I have plenty of time as I'm 'resting' as the moment.

Although don't expect a solution for a few days :-)

[Tom Lister]

update - python wasn't a quick fix for me.
I can get to see some indication of field usage by creating a Forge app. But I can't reliably test it on my small dev data sample.

If you want to try it out (in a test system!) I can look into bundling it up as a shareable app.

Tom

[Anastasiya Isgandarova]

Good morning Tom, 

Could you share your Forge App if it is possible for me to check in the our instance? 

Thank you so much