Scheduled Re-Indexing: The Robitussin For All Your Jira Project Admin Needs

[#1]

In order to provide fast searching, Jira creates an index of all the text entered into issue fields which is stored on the file system and updated whenever issue text is added or modified. However, if you alter your Jira instance by adding in customization (eg. custom fields) after issues have already been created or if the index has been lost or corrupted than it may be necessary to do a manual re-index of your data otherwise your search index will be out of sync and not return the correct information. 

The following modifications can affect the search index and may prompt you to re-index:

• Field configuration schemes
• Custom fields
• Plugins 
• Time tracking

Jira admins who make changes to any of these areas of configuration, may be familiar with the following message in your Administration view:

USERFULLNAME made configuration changes to 'SECTION' at TIME. It is recommended that you perform a re-index.For more information, please click the Help icon. To perform the re-index now, please go to the 'Indexing' section.Note: So that you only have to re-index once, you may wish to complete any other configuration changes before performing the re-index.

Re-indexing used to be a particularly painful task which could take hours if not days depending on the size of your Jira instance, causing interference and delays in your productivity.

With no way to schedule a re-indexing using Jira alone, many Jira admins suffer from either 1) Sleepless nights as they try and re-index mammoth instances in the middle of the night which can take several hours or

2) Ultra slow Jira performance if they choose to index 'right away' during business hours, resulting in frustration from everyone trying to use Jira in the office. Whichever option was chosen, someone's sanity was at stake!

Power Scripts New Scheduled Re-indexing Routines 

Thankfully, Power Scripts' new scheduled routines make re-indexing a breeze as you can now schedule the re-indexing so you don't need to run it during working hours or right away as opposed to normal Jira functionality.

Re-indexing can also happen in the background without blocking access to Jira and thanks to our new updates, the routine runs the re-index in chunks of about 2000 issues at a time so now large customers can schedule a re-index by project, and schedule out the projects they want to re-index (eg. 1 a night) so that they don't break or impact performance or slow the system down.

For the tech savvy minded: you can see the re-index progress status in the logs showing you the percentage of the re-index being done. So even during the process you can monitor the re-indexing and see how it's going. The logs are available for Administrators only.

How to schedule your Jira re-indexing

1. Go to Administration > Add-ons and select SIL Scheduler in the POWER SCRIPTS section.

2. Click the Schedule Job button in the upper right corner of the screen.

3. In the new window, select Cron for the Scheduler type

4. Enter the following expression in the Schedule input box to schedule the job to run at midnight on weekdays:

                    0 0 0 ? * MON,TUE,WED,THU,FRI *

5. Select the script that you created.

6. For the Run this script as input, select a user account with administrative privileges.

7. Press Schedule!

Power Scripts for Jira's new scheduled re-indexing function allows Jira admins to ensure both their search indexes and stress levels are well maintained with a few easy clicks! Check out our easy re-indexing routines for more information:

admReindex

admReindexProjects

[Hann SamAng]

How to create script?