Atlassian Jira Administrator ACP-100 – Introduction and the Jira Atmosphere Part 7

24. Jira Support Tools

Jira includes its support tools as part of the Support Tools plugin. These tools are designed to use the power of Hercules Atlassian support bot and to help you maintain your instance and diagnose errors. In addition to the set of support tools, Jira also includes system logs and audit logs that you can use to troubleshoot and evaluate your system. We take a look at support tools and available logs in this video to help you with Jira maintenance.

Out of the Box support tools in Jira help you get answers you need to resolve errors or issues. Depending on the tool you use. They can flag issues and include links to relevant documentation to help you resolve problems. The support tools provide an easy way for Jira administrators to raise support requests with Atlassian from inside of the Jira instance. There are four main support tools in Jira instance Health this page allows you to monitor the health of your instance based on the supported configuration for your Jira version.

The Instance Health tool includes resources to help you fix flagged configuration errors. Log Analyzer this page scans your Jira log file against the Atlassian knowledge base in order to present known errors, as well as provide resources to help fix flagged errors.

Get Help this page provides links to Atlassian documentation and Atlassian community, as well as allows you to raise support requests with Atlassian from inside your Jira instance and create support. Zip this page allows you to create a zip file of all the core diagnostic information that the Atlassian support team or your organization’s internal support team need to diagnose and resolve errors with your Jira instance.

We recommend that you use Atlassian Support for complicated technical issues that you can’t resolve through your own troubleshooting, an Atlassian partner, or reviewing similar issues on Atlassian community. An example might be a bug that you discover in the application or problems with compatibility with your hardware where documentation states that something should work and it doesn’t. Don’t reach out to support for HowTo requests, such as how to use permission schemes in Jira, or how to connect to a certain mail server.

For those requests, visit Atlassian Documentation or even reach out to a partner. As the Jira administrator, you are the first line of support, with Atlassian and Atlassian partners being the second line. As part of your support process, use documentation and Atlassian Community to research possible issues, as well as reference Jira atlas Sian. com for release notes and bug reports. Let’s check out where to find support tools in Jira administration. On the system page, we select Troubleshooting and support tools. This page includes four sections for the four built in Jira support tools instance Health Log Analyzer, GETHELP, and Create Support. Zip use these tools when troubleshooting. For example, you can check your instance health using the Instance Health tool, or you can click Get Help to have a quick link to Atlassian help Resources if your problem goes beyond what’s available in these tools.

As we discussed earlier, you can create a support Zip that includes some files and logs to help Atlassian resolve your issue. In addition to support tools, Jira provides several system logs, and each log includes several logging levels. There are five logging levels in all, and they’re in order from least detailed to most detailed fatal, error, warn, info, and debug. The default level for most logs is set to warn. You can update the logging level as needed, either temporarily or permanently. For example, if you need to set a level to a more detailed level to troubleshoot, you can do that from the Logging and Profiling page in Jira administration. If you want to update the logging level permanently, you need to edit a properties file.

For more information on logging and using the Jira logs, check out the Jira Administrator reference guide and note that the debug logging level as the most detailed record could include user passwords in the log, so be careful with this setting. Jira also includes the audit log, which includes the actions of users in the system. This log shares what user took, which action, and where they took that action. In Jira, for example, one administrator can see when another updates a workflow in the audit log. This tool is helpful for auditing actions and permissions in Jira or if you’re troubleshooting a project change.

For example, if you have a shared workflow scheme between projects, you can use the audit log to see who made a change to the scheme. If that change causes trouble for the other projects involved with the audit log, you can adjust settings so that the logs don’t include actions from your external user directory. However, you can’t sort the audit log within Jira, so if you need to sort through the log, export it to a CSV file. You can also set the audit log to a different retention period than the default of unlimited. The retention periods are one month, three months, six months, and unlimited. You should review internally before updating the audit log retention period and select a retention period that matches your organization’s requirements.

25. How to Configure Email

Email servers in Jira allow you to configure and control how Jira sends email notifications to users, or how you read emails from a mailbox to automate actions inside of your Jira instance through incoming mail. In this section, we talk about outgoing and incoming mail in Jira, as well as where to find these settings in Jira administration. Outgoing Mail is Jira functionality, which sends notifications to users when certain events happen. This notification shows up in the user’s inbox Outgoing Mail uses a connection to a separate SMTP server, which handles all technical processing required to send the emails so it doesn’t use a processing power on your Jira server. You need to first set up a mail server outside of Jira and then configure that server in your Jira instance. Let’s check out where to go for setting up outgoing mail in Jira.

We go to the Outgoing mail page. On the Outgoing Mail page, we can see that there’s a test server that has the outgoing mail currently enabled. To update the actual mail server, click Edit from Under Operations. When working with outgoing mail, we recommend a few best practices. Let’s talk about those. Next, make sure your SMTP server uses SSL. Configure the mail server to use SSL so content is secure and that the data inside of your emails won’t be intercepted during transit. Replicate your SMTP server. Configure the server so that in the case of an outage email, traffic directs automatically to the replicated server. Avoid an infinite timeout.

Set a timeout value that specifies how long juror should wait for a response from the SMTP server before it stops trying to send an email. You don’t want it to wait forever, as that causes performance issues. Do you work with another team member at your organization to set up email in Jira? Incoming Mail lets you configure Jira to receive and read emails, as well as perform actions inside of Jira when it receives an email. These actions include creating a new issue or adding comments to an existing issue. You can configure incoming mail using different mail handlers in Jira. Jira service desk uses different mail handlers. There are several mail handlers in Jira out of the box, as well as apps that you can install to extend this functionality. Each mail handler allows you to configure additional properties, such as specifying a project and issue type.

These options enable you to apply mail handlers to specific situations in your Jira instance. For example, you can create a mail handler to create a new issue or add a comment to an existing issue. The mail handler creates the new issue with the subject of the email as the summary and the body of the issue as the description in the specified project. It can also add a comment to an existing issue if there is an issue key in the subject line of the email. This is similar to how email requests work in Jira Service Desk.

However, Jira service Desk actually uses a separate mail processor for working with email requests, so the mail handler we just discussed would apply to Jira Core or Jira Software and make them more like Jira Service Desk. For more information on mail handlers, including a list of the out of the box mail handlers available in Jira, check out the Jira Administrator reference guide. Navigate to the Incoming mail page. On the incoming mail page, under mail handlers, click add.

Incoming mail handler. On the mail handler window, add information about the new handler and choose the handler you want to use. Click next to Configure Project and issue type options, as well as additional options to strip quotes. Set a reporter and set the first CC user as the issue. Assignee. As a final note, when you set up an incoming mail server, keep the same best practices in mind as an app mail server, including using SSL to provide security for the messages and replicating the server.

26. How to Send Mail in Jira

There are times when projects and configurations in your instances are no longer needed, and you may want to hide the content so your users don’t see it or so it’s available in readonly mode. In other words, you need to archive. There are a couple of ways you can archive in Jira, but we’re going to focus mainly on one in this video. Online archiving. We also talked briefly about offline archiving, and you can find out more from the Jira Administrator Reference Guide. Violet, our Jira administrator for Great Adventure, needs to remove an old project from Human Resources from the list of active projects. The department may need to access the project in the future, so she needs to be able to restore the project quickly. However, they don’t really need to do anything else with the project other than preserve the data. What are some of her options? If Violet uses online archiving within Jira, she can manage the data in a way that allows her to reactivate the project if the users need to access it again.

Reviewing her options, Violet can make the project read only so it’s visible, but no one can add new issues, make the project hidden from all users but Jira administrators, or make some of the issues in the project hidden so that no one can work on those issues anymore. Violet decides to make the project hidden from all users but Jira administrators. She also needs to think about working with the company to develop a retention policy so they don’t end up with a bunch of unused projects in a readonly or hidden state. If you want to read more about the other two options for online archiving, check out the Jira Administrator Reference Guide. Before we move on, let’s take a moment and consider what you might do in this situation. Does a policy for project retention already exist at your organization? And don’t forget to practice online archiving using our activity workbook as a guide. Violet knows that the Human Resources project needs to be set as a hidden project.

With this method, no one but a Jira administrator can see it, and Violet can easily restore the project if Human Resources needs to access it. This method uses permission schemes and project categories to achieve the goal of a hidden project. Let’s take a look. From the top ribbon, click the Jira Administration menu, and then select Projects. We’re going to first create a new project category for hidden projects. On the Projects page in the left menu, click Project Categories.

Create a new Project category for hidden projects with an appropriate name and description. When you have the information complete, click Add to add the new category. For example, we call this category Hidden with a description of this category is for hidden or archived projects. Next, we need to add a permission scheme to associate with the project. From the top ribbon, click the Jira Admin menu, and then select Issues or you can press Period and then start typing. To Access menus with the dialog box on the Issues page in the left menu, click Permissions Schemes. On the permission schemes page, click Add permission scheme. Then create a new permission scheme with an appropriate name and description. When you have the information complete, just click Add.

In our example, we call this scheme Hidden Project Permission Scheme and use a description. This permission scheme is for hidden Projects. If you want, you can click Permissions under Actions next to the new permission scheme, and you see that there are no granted permissions for this new scheme. It’s totally blank, which is exactly what you want at this point. If we set only the Browse Projects permission in the scheme, then we create a read only permission scheme. Let’s take a moment to review before we move on to the next step. We’ve created a project category for Hidden Projects, and we’ve created a blank permission scheme so that no users can interact with the project other than Jira Administrators. Now let’s finish the process and add the permission scheme to our hidden project and place that project in the appropriate category.

Navigate to the Project Setting page for the project you need to archive. We need to archive human Resources benefits planning 2016. On the Project Summary page, scroll to the Permission section, and then click the scheme listed next to Scheme for the project. For this project, we see Default Permission Scheme, but you may have something else in place in your own instance. On the Project Permissions page in the Actions menu, select Use a different scheme. Then, on the Associate Permission Scheme to Project screen in the menu, select the permission scheme you created, and then associate that scheme with the project. We select Hidden Project Permission Scheme and then click Associate to apply it.

Once you apply the scheme, check out the Projects page from the Top ribbon to verify that users can’t see the project. You and other Jira Administrators can still see the project from the Projects page within Jira Administration to on archive a project, switch the Project’s Permission scheme back to its original permission scheme, and set the Project category to its original category. Online archiving allows you to quickly restore the archive project, but keep it secret and safe from your users. What about if you need to archive the project and not necessarily have it readily available to get back into action? That’s where offline Archiving comes in.

We’re not going to go into Offline Archiving and Backups in this video, but it’s an option for archiving your projects. However, it is complicated to restore a project from an offline backup, so we recommend for cases where you need to restore that, you use an online archiving method instead. For more information and best practices on Archiving, check out the Jira Administrator Reference Guide.