Are there any problems related to deleting issues in jira

[Jørgen Sandtorv]

We use Zabbix to monitor hardware. And we have seen over time that zabbix create and resolves a lot of issues I our Jira SM. about 75% of the issues are created and closed before any agents are involved in these issues. 

We are tweaking these "alarms" in Zabbix, but there are a lot of old issues (about 100k) that we don't need, and would like to purge from the project. 

I have read on this community that people are advised not to ever delete issues. 

I would like to know if there are any problems we have to consider before deleting 75k issues that could break the system, or if the advisement is just related to historic data , revision etc.?

The reason we want to delete this issues is related to the time jira have to spend on indexing every time we do any changes to SLA or custom fields etc. 

[Rilwan Ahmed · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jørgen Sandtorv ,

1. Use bulk edit and delete issues in 1000's or even less. 
2. I would suggest to do it after business hours or on Weekend as the process consumes lot of resources and makes the jira slow.

Please note: Once a ticket is deleted, it cannot be restored. 

[Jørgen Sandtorv]

Hi @Rilwan Ahmed 

Thank you for your reply. 

Can you also confirm that deleting issues does not result in any other problems than loosing the actual issues? There will be no problems with the database or elsewhere in Jira system/software because of deletion of a number of issues? 

[Rilwan Ahmed]

Hi @Jørgen Sandtorv ,

Doing it in smaller batches will not impact anything. 
As informed earlier, there could be performance issues during the deletion. So smaller the batches (depending on your system resources), better is the performance. 

I would strongly suggest to do it after business hours or on Weekend when the load is very low. 

[Jørgen Sandtorv]

Hi again @Rilwan Ahmed 

Thanks for clearing this up for us. Really helpful information. 

Take care :)

[Rilwan Ahmed]

@Jørgen Sandtorv ,

Keep me posted on the updates. Also please accept the answer if you find it useful.