Is it true that only Global Administrators can import CSV files into Jira

[Stephen Ellwood]

I work for a company of 21,000 people.  I am not a Global Jira administrator on our Jira Data Center instance as only IT staff quite rightly have that privilege.

I have an Excel file containing a few hundred requirements I want to import into a Project where I am an administrator. I read the documentation on how to do this but when I click on the cog symbol I do not get the option to import data.  Then I read that only global administrators have this privilege. 

This is most unfortunate as we want to migrate all of our legacy projects containing thousands of requirements to Jira and it means that our IT department will be fully occupied with this for months instead of being able to distribute this over several hundred people.  The other tool in use within my company, Polarion, does not have this limitation. If this limitation is true then this will effectively prevent us from using Jira for our projects.

Are any other methods open to me? Could I, for instance, use Python and the REST API to do this? What is the reason for this limitation?

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Stephen Ellwood 

You could do a JSON import as well, but via the API the same restrictions apply.

You need to be global Jira admin.

You can import a CSV in a project only of you are project admin.

See: Importing data from CSV-bulk-import 

[Stephen Ellwood]

Ok, this looks like what I wanted.  I did think it was unthinkable that only Global Jira Admins could do this but it seems my documentation search took me to the wrong instructions and there was no cross referencing to get me to the URL you posted. I will try it.