Help us improve upgrades!

[isha]

Hey Community!

As an Atlassian admin, with great power comes great responsibility. One of these responsibilities is upgrading your server instance. 

We're currently looking into how we can improve this upgrade experience for our admins. 

If you're an admin, we'd love to hear from you about the challenges you encounter during upgrading your Atlassian products so that we can improve and develop features that are valuable for your organisation to get to the latest versions of our products. 

If you're interested, please reach out to me on imehta@atlassian.com

Thank you in advance! Also please share this with any of your networks that might be interested. 

Thanks,

Isha & the Server team. 

[Matt Doar]

One obvious problem is with large instances and long operations having no log messages for a long time. The log can just go quiet for five minutes at a time. Did it crash? Is it still going? What's happening?

[Matt Doar]

Another idea: a clearer list of which upgrade jobs have been run and which ones involved changing existing data in the database, or changed the schema of the database. Those two pieces of knowledge are how admins decide whether they can roll back an upgrade.

[Vickey Palzor Lepcha]

It would be great if upgrade activity triggers creation of a separate logfile called atlassian-upgrade.log which would actually log all messages of upgrade.

I have seen that in a couple of other tools and make log checking pretty convenient.

[Matt Doar]

Good idea! With a date in the filename to help keep track of multiple upgrade attempts

[Huw Evans]

I second this as it's a fantastic idea. 

[Caterina Curti]

Fisheye already does this and it helps a lot (even Support when analyzing upgrade related issue) @isha

[Craig Castle-Mead]

Agree with both the above (progress updates for long running tasks and upgrade specific logs). 

It’d be amazing if you took a big win from the Bitbucket team too and moved all (or at least more) of the config (seraph, server.xml, Crowd.properties etc) out of the application directory and in to the data dir and/or environmental variables that aren’t overwritten by an upgrade. 

While we have custom templates we override as well and would still need to be replaced, at least the key settings would be persistent and we’d just have to worry about the advanced config.

I forget if JIRA is included in this, but the bin installer for some of the products also re-chown’s all the data files, and with hundreds of GB of files, this can take quite a while but this is often be a redundant step (unless you change the user the app is running as between versions). Anything to minimize downtime during an upgrade window is a win. 

CCM