• Akeles Top 10 Marketplace apps in 2022

    7 February 2023
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    Are you curious which apps other users are buying to extend the capabilities of their Jira, Confluence or Bitbucket?

    This year, we are pleased to share again our updated Top 10 Popular apps with fellow Atlassian users.
    It is a good opportunity to review which useful capabilities to add to your Atlassian suite.

    From our perspective, Marketplace apps play a significant role for successful adoption by

    • enabling automation to improve productivity, speed or security
    • providing additional capabilities like Business Analytics, Test Automation, etc
    • organising information to provide insight and facilitate collaboration

    How is the ranking done?

    The ranking is based on the number of licenses bought through us in 2022.
    We felt this will be a better measure of the popularity of the app.

    In event of a tie, we go by the licensed users count, followed by the total sale value for the app.

    Akeles Top 10 List

    Congratulations to the winners. It is an achievement given there are over 4,300 apps listed in Atlassian Marketplace.

    (more…)

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  • Why being a Jira Admin is a Tough Job

    28 July 2022
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    Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

    Thank you Jira Admins

    Do you know that July is the Jira Admin Appreciation Month, and 15th of July is the official Jira Admin Appreciation Day?

    As an Atlassian Solution Partner as well as a Marketplace Partner, we work closely with many Jira Admins and witnessed their passion, ingenuity and dedication on countless occasions.

    We would like to take the opportunity to share some wonderful Jira Admins we encountered

    • Kamar who worked with us to troubleshoot a mystery case on the sudden slowdown in Jira’s performance
    • Jun Xiang who set up a new service desk project all by himself, saving the money to buy an additional system
    • Hany who suggested improvements for a Marketplace app so that his team can work more effectively
    • Graeme who organised lunch and learn sessions for colleagues to share his Jira knowledge
    • Coral who stayed up until 5am so that Jira can be operational when her colleagues return to work on Monday
    • and many others who took time after work to attend Atlassian Community Events to beef up their knowledge

    What people think a Jira Admin do?

    How IT people see each other

    Going by the literal meaning, the Jira administrator is the person who administers the Jira web application.

    What a Jira Admin really do?

    However in the real life, the Jira Admins are responsible for everything that is related to Jira.
    This is a norm because many organisations do not have a team to manage Jira. Usually the Jira admin will have to wear multiple hats. More importantly, these roles also require knowledge of Jira.

    Here are some additional roles the Jira Admins are taking up:

    Jira System Engineer

    This role focuses on tasks related with systems. It requires competency in both inner workings of Jira as well as the backend systems. Some examples of the tasks are:

    • Handle Level 2 support by analysing Jira application or access logs
    • Work with Atlassian Support or App Vendors for complex cases
    • Using SQL on the database to generate reports or patch data
    • Perform Application/Server Performance Tuning
    • Perform upgrades and Disaster Recovery (DR) planning
    • Work with Security to conduct Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VAPT)

    Jira Solution Engineer

    This role focuses on the business aspect. By providing solutions using Jira to deliver new capabilities, it increases the ROI. Some examples of the tasks are:

    • Create Jira project templates for new use cases
    • Build Jira workflows that help to improve the flow
    • Design Jira dashboards or BI reports to give visibility to the stakeholders
    • Select Marketplace apps to fulfill business requirements or improve productivity
    • Write scripts to automate some tasks
    • Or even coding Jira plugins for customised features

    Jira Coach

    This role focuses on the people aspect by helping fellow Jira users to use Jira more effectively. Some examples of the tasks are:

    • Conduct training
    • Answer questions related on the usage
    • Write KB articles on Confluence
    • Promote the use of Jira within the organisation
    • Analyse statistics to identify trends and area for improvement
    Additional roles taken up by the Jira Admins. In dedication to all the Jira Admins

    How to help your Jira Admins?

    In some scenarios, the Jira admin might even be a part-time responsibility in additional to their official job description.

    The workload will pile up until the company will engage a Solution Partner or an Atlassian Technical Account Manager for additional support.

    We have listed 9 ways to reduce the workload for your beloved Jira Admins

    1. Give up on your Jira admin rights (if you are not trained in Jira)
      • That can reduce unnecessary fire-fighting due to mistakes
      • Otherwise get proper training to be a Jira admins
    2. Look for the Jira project admins instead of the Jira admins for project permission requests
      • It can be death by a thousand paper cuts with 1 request from every user
    3. Standardize your project workflows
      • It can be messy when every project have a different workflow and different set of custom fields
    4. Raise your requests in Jira
      • That will facilitate tracking and fulfilment by the Jira Admins
    5. Use apps
      • They can automate some of the manual tasks taking up the Jira Admin’s time
    6. Use a LTS version to reduce the upgrade cadence
      • Every upgrade consumes time and effort
      • It is easier to patch an LTS version
      • It helps to minimise the turnaround time in event of a security advisory
    7. Upgrade at least once a year 
      • The risk, complexity and technical debt increases over time
    8. Host Jira behind the firewall
      • Use VPN or Zero Trust Network to access if your team are working remotely
      • That will reduce a lot of work on security
    9. Use Jira Cloud if it is suitable for your organisation
      • Atlassian will take over some of the workload

    Hopefully with more time, the Jira admins can make Jira better for everyone.

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  • CVE-2022-26134 – How to check and protect your Confluence

    6 June 2022
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    Last Friday, Volexity published a zero day exploit (CVE-2022-26134) on Atlassian Confluence. This post is to share some tips on how to check your Confluence instance is safe, and also some practical advice to protect your Confluence on-prem. 

    About the vulnerability

    This bug affects all versions of Confluence since 1.3.0. It is a critical vulnerability because it allows unauthenticated users to execute code within the Confluence server remotely. According to Imperva Threat Research, there are widespread scanning and attempts of exploitation on the Internet.

    How to fix the vulnerability

    Atlassian alerted the customers promptly and responded with high priority. We are thankful that Atlassian released the fix in less than 24 hours.

    For details of the fix, please refer to the official Confluence Security Advisory 2022-06-02.

    How to check your Confluence for malicious access

    Here are some basic checks that you can execute to check for any traces of malicious attempts. If there is any occurrence, then you may want to engage the security experts for more in-depth foresenic investigation.

    URL requests containing ${

    Since one of the attack mechanisms is to use ${ in the request URL, it would be helpful to scan the web server access logs for any occurrences. Please update the path of the Apache httpd/ Nginx access logs accordingly.

    grep '${' /etc/httpd/logs/*access*.log
    grep '%24%7B' /etc/httpd/logs/*access*.log
    

    URL requests from known IP addresses

    Based on the Volexity report, there are some IP addresses which are used by the attackers. Similarly, you can grep the access logs to check for any occurrences. Note: It is possible that there may be other attackers using other IP addresses.

    grep 154.146.34.145 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 154.16.105.147 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 156.146.34.46 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 156.146.34.52 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 156.146.34.9 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 156.146.56.136 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 198.147.22.148 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 198.147.22.148 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 221.178.126.244 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 45.43.19.91 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 59.163.248.170 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 64.64.228.239 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 66.115.182.102 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 66.115.182.111 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 67.149.61.16 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*
    grep 98.32.230.38 /etc/httpd/logs/*access*

    How to protect your Confluence instance

    Actually, the best form of defense against unauthenticated attacks is to place the server behind the firewall. This will effectively block all attackers from mounting a direct attack remotely. That is a key reason why some security sensitive enterprises are choosing Confluence Data Center. We know that it is not possible for a software to be 100% free of bugs. So there might be another vulnerability waiting to be discovered in the future.

    By using Long Term Support release of the product, it reduces the effort to upgrade since the critical security fixes will be available as long it is architecturally possible. This contributes greatly to a quick reaction to any future zero day exploits.

    For those organizations who are working remotely, it is possible to access via VPN or use Web application firewalls for added protection. Both CloudFlare and Imperva have announced that their customers are protected from this vulnerability since they will ensure all requests are authenticated before relaying it to Confluence.

    Last but not least, do make sure the license technical contacts are up-to-date. As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we have witnessed a number of occurrences when critical alerts from Atlassian are missed due to staff turnover.

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  • Akeles Top 10 Marketplace apps in 2021

    8 February 2022
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    This year, we are continuing the tradition of sharing our Top 10 popular apps for Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket.

    From our perspective, Marketplace apps play a significant role for successful adoption of Atlassian platforms by

    • enabling automation to improve productivity, speed or security
    • adding features to provide additional capabilities like Business Analytics, Test Automation, etc
    • organising information to provide insight and facilitate collaboration

    This year, Atlassian Marketplace reached $2 billion in lifetime sales. This is a huge testimony of the usefulness and popularity of Marketplace apps.

    How is the ranking done?

    The ranking is based on the number of licenses (Server/DC/Cloud) customers bought in 2021.
    We felt this will be a better measure of the popularity of the app.

    In event of a tie, we go by the licensed users count, followed by the total sale value for the app.

    Akeles Top 10 List

    We are pleased to share our list for 2021 voted by the Atlassian users in Singapore. Although our list may not correspond to the global popularity in Atlassian Marketplace, it is an affirmation in the usefulness of the apps. 

    Congratulations to the winners.

    (more…)

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  • Is My Jira apps affected by Log4j CVE-2021-44228

    18 December 2021
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    log4shell cover image

    What is CVE-2021-44228

    CVE-2021-44228 or log4shell is a serious vulnerability discovered recently. It allows an attacker to execute malicious code in any applications which uses a vulnerable version of log4j (Version 2.0 onwards). The impact is very severe because:

    • It is extremely simple to execute such an attack
    • Log4J is the most popular logging framework used by many Java applications
    • There are already many attempts on the Internet to scan for this loophole

    The official guideline is to patch the applications to upgrade to Log4J version 2.16 onwards.

    Are Akeles Jira/Confluence apps safe?

    Thankfully with applications like Bitbucket and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, we were able to identify the 3rd party components used in our applications.

    We have verified that we do not bundle the log4j library in our Jira/Confluence apps. We are using the log4j library that is provided by Jira/Confluence. Hence we are safe.

    Another piece of reassuring news is Atlassian is also scanning the apps listed on the Atlassian Marketplace.

    Each vulnerable DC or server app will be given the same expedited deadline as cloud apps. DC and server apps that fail to address the vulnerability within this expedited timeframe will be removed from the marketplace, and then Atlassian will inform customers who have vulnerable paid apps installed.

    While doing research for our customers, we have also compiled a list of official statements from fellow App publishers. Hope it will be helpful for those who need to do their “due diligence”.

    Is my Atlassian applications safe?

    Jira/Confluence

    Atlassian has put up a detailed official advisory that stated that Jira and Confluence are using an Atlassian-maintained fork of Log4J 1.2.17 which is not vulnerable to CVE-2021-44228. However they confirmed a similar but low risk vulnerability (CVE-2021-4104) which is exposed only if the log4j configuration has been modified from their default settings.

    The risk is low because these settings are not enabled by default. Nevertheless, it is better to counter check again.

    Bitbucket

    While Bitbucket is not affected by the Remote Code Execution, it may be risk of information leakage due to the use of affected versions of ElasticSearch. The remediation steps are available on Atlassian security advisory.

    Is my Sonatype applications safe?

    For our customers who are using Sonatype products, Nexus Lifecycle, Nexus Firewall or Nexus Repository are using logback instead of log4j. Hence they are not affected. The official statement is available at Sonatype website.

    Food for Thoughts

    The connectivity of the Internet makes it even more challenging to prevent such zero-day vulnerability. Here are some questions we need to take in considerations for the IT strategy (tooling, SaaS services, architecture, processes, automation, etc)

    • How can we be notified of any vulnerabilities as soon as possible?
    • How can we minimise the risks and impact of an attack?
    • How can we identify the affected applications quickly?
    • How can we ensure the 3rd party libraries used are safe?
    • How can we patch the affected applications in a timely manner?

    Useful Resources

    You may want to consult the following pages for more information

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  • Best Practices in Jira Administration – API Tokens

    12 November 2021
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    Best practices in Jira Administration with API Tokens

    One of Jira’s strengths is that it allows 3rd party integration via REST API calls. By providing the username, password and Base URL, it is possible to 3rd party apps to query or update Jira automatically.

    In this article, we will share why using API Tokens is a better and safer option than using Password Authentication.

    The Power of Passwords

    Besides entering passwords on the Jira login screen, it is also possible to provide the passwords on 3rd party applications or scripts to execute REST API calls.

    Some of the use cases are like

    • Create issues from Slack
    • Send alerts to Microsoft Teams
    • Update Jira issues with Commits information from GitHub
    • Integrate with your in-house systems

    If the password fails in the wrong hands, it is possible that

    • Wikileaks of your confidential data
    • Your Jira system can slow down drastically due to excessive API calls which affects the usage of other users

    Benefits of using API Tokens over Passwords

    By using API Token, it improves the security of your Jira instance

    • Safer – The API Token has a certain level of password complexity which defends against dictionary attacks
    • Isolation – It distributes the risk by having a different API token for each 3rd party integration. It is possible to revoke/reset the token for that application without any impact to other applications.
    • Differentiation – With a different mechanism, it is possible to apply more stringent checks on the usage of API Tokens (e.g. restriction by IP address range)
    • Control – It restricts ordinary users from using their credentials to do REST API calls 
    • Availability – For sites running on Single Sign On. Users will not know their passwords other than their Windows passwords
    • Validity – It is possible to set the expiry date of the token

    API Token Authentication for Jira

    We like the API Token Authentication Jira because it offers the following features:

    Disable basic authentication with user passwords

    It allows basic authentication with API Tokens. Currently, it is not possible to use the Jira Data Center’s Personal Access Token together with the username on 3rd party websites. 

    Personal Access Tokens cannot be used for Basic authentication that is commonly used by 3rd party websites

    Warning: If you disable Basic Authentication with passwords in the System Wide settings, you also can’t authenticate on non REST endpoints with API Tokens directly. You can still do that by reusing a session you got from authenticating with an API Token.

    Able to limit usage to particular IP ranges

    It is possible to limit the usage of the API token to the IP address of the internal system. You can ensure the REST API calls are coming from your trusted network.

    You can limit by ip range for API token usage

    Block requests with malicious characters in path

    This is a bonus feature which helps to defend against some attack vectors.

    Block malicious characters in path

    Limit usage of API Tokens

    It is a security best practice to grant rights only to users who needs it and has proper training. There are incidents arising from users who entered their Jira passwords on 3rd party sites or executed a buggy script.

    which users can create API tokens

    Tip: We recommend to create a group “jira-api-users” to manage those service account users who can use API Tokens.

    Set a validity of the API Token

    If the token is for testing or for temporary usage, the Jira admin can just set a shorter validity that will expire automatically. Otherwise it relies on the Jira Admins to remember to revoke the access manually.

    Service Accounts typically do not have a password validity. If the service account is from an Active Directory, there could be disruption if there is a 90 day reset password policy.

    By using the Active Directory passwords, it is possible that account is locked out of all applications after multiple wrong password attempts.

    Control over audit logging

    It offers admins a fine level of control over the information to be logged.

    What should be audit logged
    Logging of failed attempts
    audit logging of permission errors
    (more…)

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  • Canned Search for Confluence

    22 July 2021
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    After months of hard work, we are proud to announce the availability of Canned Search for Confluence (Data Center edition).

    As the plugin has many ways to search content within Confluence, we thought it is easier to digest the information with a Powerpoint deck.

    If you find it difficult to get the information you need, you can try this out. You may discover new

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  • 7 Things You need to Know about Automation for Jira

    13 July 2021
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    Automation for Jira is one of the most popular apps on Jira. The app allows users to automate and extend Jira with no coding required. Being very user-friendly, there are a lot of admins who can dive straight into using the tool without reading the user guide. As part of our Best Practices series, we have summarised the key things you need to know in this blog post.

    For those who are new to Automation for Jira, you can check out this YouTube video below for an introduction.

    Things you need to know

    1) Asynchronous processing

    To speed up on the response time, the Automation for Jira plugin will add all updated issues into a queue. Although there are 8 background threads to process the requests, it still does not ensure the issue are processed immediately. Therefore, users will need to refresh the issue to view the changes applied by the automation rule.

    It is possible to select synchronous execution of the rule but that will have some impact in the performance.

    2) Rule Matching/Execution

    Whenever an issue is updated, the issue is matched against all the configured automation rules (global + project) . As a result, when there are a lot of automation rules, it takes time to 

    • to check against each individual automation rule
    • to execute against each matching automation rule

    Hence it is important to reduce the number of global automation rules by setting them as single project rules whenever possible. You should try to optimise the rules with more specific requirements.

    If you are seeing a lot of No Actions Performed in the rule’s audit log, then there might be chance for optimising the rule

    No actions performed could mean a waste of processing time

    3) Traceability

    The powerful app allows multiple rules to update an issue due to a single triggered event. As a result, it may not be direct to identify the problematic rule. Moreover, if multiple rules are chained together without proper planning, it could lead to “spaghetti code” scenarios which is not easy to troubleshoot.

    If the update is via workflow post functions, it would be easier to identify the bug.

    4) Performance & Runtime

    To cater to the flexibility and power of the Automation for Jira plugin, there are some tradeoffs. One of them is the processing time for automation rules is slower than post functions. For example, a simple assignment rule can take up to 3s to complete.

    Audit logs show you the duration taken for each automation

    We have encountered some rules that can take up over 10 seconds to be processed. So you should check the audit logs on the performance of the rules.

    5) Service Limits

    Not a lot of users are aware of the Service Limits which can affect the execution of the automation rules. Some of the common service limits are listed in the table below:

    There are service limits imposed to ensure the performance of the Jira

    When any of the limits is breached, the rules will be throttled until the limits are not exceeded. This could result in some unexpected behaviours as the issues are not processed during this period.

    When service limits are exceeded, throttling will happen

    The likelihood of throttling is increased when a huge number of issues are created via REST API or Test Automation plugins.

    6) Housekeeping

    The app maintains an audit log of the rule executions. Over time, the audit logs can build up which impacts your Jira database performance and clogging up your disk space. 

    You can set audit log expiry to improve the performance of your Jira system

    We have encountered some sites which the retention period is set to the default value of forever.

    It will be good to revise the retention period and set the schedule expiry during off-peak periods. For more info, check out this KB article.

    7) Integration with other apps

    Not a lot of people are aware that there are other apps which are compatible with Automation for Jira app. If you have these apps, you can use them with automation rules too.

    Best Practices

    1. Try to scope the rules within the project if possible. Use global rules only when necessary.
    2. Make sure your Jira project administrators know what they are doing. You can consider restricting the rights to trained project administrators (e.g. jira-power-admins group)
    3. Read up on Knowledge base and blog posts
    4. Conduct periodic audits. You can view performance Insights to see if there is any issues
    Performance insight gives you visibility on how the automation rules are running

    Conclusion

    Automation for Jira is a very useful feature. However, there is a likelihood to see everything as a nail when you have a hammer in your hand. This can result in performance issues in time to come.

    We will need to understand what is the requirements and the underlying approach used by various apps. For certain scenarios, we feel it is better to use post functions with apps like

    Hopefully, with these knowledge, Jira admins can apply Automation for Jira effectively.

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  • Akeles releases 5 Forge Apps on Atlassian Marketplace

    31 May 2021
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    We are proud to be featured in Atlassian’s annual Developer Day to be one of the pioneer Forge apps listed on Atlassian Marketplace.

    First Forge apps on Atlassian Marketplace

    What is Atlassian Forge

    Forge is Atlassian’s next generation Cloud app development platform. Unlike traditional cloud apps, Forge apps run within Atlassian’s infrastructure, providing better performance and stronger integration. The data can be stored in Atlassian Cloud, which can address compliance issues like GDPR or data residency.  

    Introducing our 5 new Forge apps

    This time round, we are launching not 1, but 5 Cloud apps that are all built on Atlassian Forge. 3 of them are brand new apps which are only available for Atlassian Cloud.

    1) Banners for Confluence Cloud (Cloud First)

    You can now add Confluence macros to display heading banners to improve the readability of your content in Confluence.

    2) Canned Search for Confluence Cloud

    Users can search faster with better results by using contextual information from the current page. You can

    • restrict your search to the children pages
    • click the auto-generated link to go the previous meeting minutes/release notes
    • order the search results based on the modified date
    • output the search results in tabular format
    CQL Navigation macro to navigate related pages

    3) Countdown Timer for Confluence Cloud

    This is a Cloud edition for our popular app for Confluence Server/Data Center. It displays the time remaining based on the date provided in the Confluence macro.

    Countdown Timer for Confluence Cloud

    This is useful to remind the project teams how much time they have to their next major delivery.

    4) Issue Progress for Jira Cloud (Cloud First)

    This Jira Forge app allows users to generate a report across linked/sub-task issues based on the selected metric (e.g. count, story points, number fields, etc) within the issue view. This enables user to have a quick overview of current issue’s progress and the distribution of workload across the related issues.

    Our Forge app allows you to check the current progress of your epics

    We built this app specially for ourselves since we use Jira Service Management Cloud to support our customers on Atlassian Marketplace. By dog-fooding, we can understand the pain points and come up with better strategy or solutions.

    displays related tickets in agent view

    Now, we can see the tickets raised by the same Reporter in the issue. This helps in providing us with a better picture, so that we can address our customers in a personalized manner.

    How is our experience with Forge?

    As an Cloud app vendor, we like Forge because the backend infrastructure is taken care totally by Atlassian. There is no need for us to spend time and money to set up and monitor external platforms. We only need to focus on developing the apps.

    We are looking forward to more features in Forge so that we can add more capabilities to our Cloud apps. Our #1 wish is to display the number of active instances on the Marketplace listing. Currently, the number of Forge installations are not included in the count.

    How can you help?

    We look forward to your feedback on how to improve our Cloud apps. You can reach out to us via our Service Desk running on Jira Service Management Cloud.

    Also, YouTube requires us to have 100 or more subscribers before we can apply for a custom URL for our Akeles YouTube channel. If you think the videos are useful and would like to support us, kindly click on the Subscribe button on the video. Thank you in advance for your support.

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  • How to make Jira Dashboards faster

    25 March 2021
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    We have identified Jira Dashboards can be a potential bottleneck while helping our customer to tune the performance of their Jira. This article explains why Jira takes longer time and give some tips on how to speed things up. 

    Why my Jira Dashboard takes a long time to load?

    These are some factors that contributes to the slowness of Jira:

    1. Huge number of gadgets within a single dashboard
    2. Gadgets with complex reporting
    3. Filters with a huge number of issues

    Huge number of gadgets

    Whenever a Jira Dashboard page is loaded, the browser will send a number of requests to the server for all the CSS and Javascript required. (For more details, check out JRASERVER-62126). When there are more gadgets, it will fire more requests.

    It will be faster if you focused doing 1 task at a time versus doing 100 tasks concurrently. By the same principle, your dashboard will load faster if Jira has less requests to work on at the same time.

    Jira helps with a default maximum limit of 20 gadgets within a dashboard. However, it is possible to modify the limits on the number of gadgets on a dashboard.

    When there are way too many requests

    We have a couple of support tickets which the end users added a lot of Gauge Gadgets in their dashboard. As a result, some gadgets on the dashboards cannot load.

    This is because the browser will silently throw the error message Failed to load resource: net::ERR_INSUFFICIENT_RESOURCES if it detects that are way too many requests within a short interval.

    To support the users, we introduced Multiple Filters Counter Gadget that can display multiple counter within a single gadget.

    Multiple Filters Counter Gadget loads faster by rendering multiple gadgets within a single gadget

    Complex Reporting Gadgets

    Not all Jira gadgets are the same. There are some gadgets which involves complex processing. For example, our Tissue for Jira app performs the handy task of traversing all the linked issues and extracting the various field values to present a tabular overview.

    Smart Grouping of linked issues

    If you are using such complex reporting gadget, it will be advisable to have lesser gadgets within that dashboard.

    Filters with many matching issues

    It is likely that some dashboards load very fast when they were created initially. However, as the number of issues in the project increases over time, the performance of the dashboard become slower without the original author noticing.

    This is because there are more issues to be processed. A useful tip will be to time-box your Jira filters within a time period using JQL date functions like startOfYear(), startOfMonth()

    Alternatively, you can use our Rolling Window Monthly/Weekly Gadgets which only retrieve the matching issues in the last X weeks/months specified.

    Rolling Window Weekly Gadget loads your report faster by time-boxing the scope of your report automatically

    Other ways to load your Jira Dashboards faster

    Add more computing power

    The simplest way is to pump more computing resources like more CPU and memory. Jira Data Center also scales the performance by distributing the workload across more nodes.

    Split into multiple dashboards

    As mentioned previously in Best Practices in Jira Dashboard Reporting, it is recommended to keep a dashboard to its objectives to allow people to identify the action required.

    But it is troublesome to have many dashboards

    Beside adding the links to various dashboards as project shortcuts in your Jira project, you can also add links to related dashboards using our free Link Menu Gadget to facilitate navigation. You can also add links to the your Confluence spaces and other related project resources too.

    Links Menu Gadget allows users to link to related project artifacts easily from the dashboard

    If that is still not enough and you want to access your dashboards easily from everywhere in Jira. You can organise your Dashboards in cascading Dashboard Folders which can be accessible in the Jira top menu.

    Cascading Dashboard Folders make it faster to load your dashboards from anywhere in Jira

    What is the performance of your Jira Dashboard?

    You may want to do the 23 seconds test on your frequently used dashboards. If it is taking longer than that, you might want to tidy up your dashboards.

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