Jira is great at storing, associating, and aggregating user-generated data across many dimensions for enablement of, and deep insights into, an organization's project planning and tracking workflow. However, it is not terribly good at providing important and actionable system-generated data about itself. As Jira adoption grows and scales throughout an enterprise, it becomes a business-critical production application that must be performant 24/7. We will discuss many common performance problems that he has experienced over the years as a Jira administrator, which inspired him to explore methods to track and correlate historical performance metrics and to provide actionable and predictive metrics to avoid future problems. We will also present a real-world show-and-tell for how this concept can be implemented with a machine data aggregator like Splunk.

1. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Justin Evans
Director, Product Owner
DevOps
Splunk’ing Jira for Deep
Insights Into Application,
Database and Server
Health Trends

2. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
AGENDA
Introductions
Common Jira Performance Degradation & Failure Mechanisms
Live Demo: Atlassian Application Dashboards within Splunk
How We Can Help
Q & A
1
2
3
4
5

3. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
INTRODUCTIONS

4. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Our Mission
To help teams produce the extraordinary

5. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com

6. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
AGENDA
Introductions
Common Jira Performance Degradation & Failure
Mechanisms
Live Demo: Atlassian Application Dashboards within Splunk
How We Can Help
Q & A
1
2
3
4
5

7. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
JIRA FAILURE & PERFORMANCE
DEGRADATION MECHANISMS
I’m sure I haven’t seen it all, but… I’ve seen a whole lot
(Certainly not exhaustive)

8. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Monitor HTTP Access Logs
… and run statistics for a
given timeframe.
Correlate application
response times with number
of users and what they are
accessing
Too Many Concurrent Users
Case Study
It’s Tuesday at 10AM.
Your organization is fully agile,
and every team performs sprint
planning sessions at the same
time.
Users are reporting that “Jira is
slow”.

9. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Monitor Web Proxy and/or
dB Slow Query Log
… and determine which
filters are causing problems,
and what its true impact is in
terms of response times
Long Running / Suboptimal JQL in Filters or Dashboards
Case Study
You have Service Desk installed, and
multiple queues leverage Script
Runner JQL to filter queues by
comment authors and timestamps
Your organization has 50 agents who
regularly refresh the page containing
queues / filters
Users are reporting that “Jira is slow”.

10. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Excessive Total Issues +/*Custom Fields
Case Study
Your clean, shiny, new Jira application
was once blazing fast, but has slowed
over time.
Now you have 200,000 issues and
300 custom fields.
Users are reporting that “Jira is slow”.
Monitor dB for Custom
Field / Issue Records &
Usage
… and monitor response
times over time, correlating
with the addition of issues
and custom fields

11. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
TIMES I WISH I HAD SPLUNK
A couple outrageous case studies as a Jira administrator
(Again… not exhaustive)

12. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Jira’s Been Slow for Weeks & We Don’t Know Why
Hey Justin, Jira’s been really slow
“OK, give me a copy of the application
log files” …the log file is 20+ GB and
you can’t open it with any desktop
software because it crashes memory
Enable logrotate on the server. Some
improvement! Didn’t fix the issue.
Finally extract the past few days of log
files. Structure synchronizers (30+)
were failing every minute …for weeks!
Real-Time Log Aggregation
… along with alerting, I
would have seen this within
a few minutes of the error
condition beginning

13. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Real-Time Log Aggregation
… you’re going to miss
important information if
you’re tail’ing your logs
during crunch time when
minutes count
Jira Won’t Start & We Don’t Know Why
Hey Justin, <Client>’s Jira won’t
start, can you jump on a call?
“OK, have you disabled all add-ons?”
-> “Yes”
“Let me see your log files”
-> “Can’t access the server. Security
concerns”
VNC Session: sudo tail –f –n 50
/var/atlassian/application-
data/jira/log/atlassian-jira.log

14. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Jira Won’t Start & We Don’t Know Why

15. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE
Process Changes
Application Configuration Modifications
Requests for IT Budget & Resources
Alerting & Forecasting – Getting Ahead of the Complaints

16. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
AGENDA
Introductions
Common Jira Performance Degradation & Failure Mechanisms
Live Demo: Atlassian Application Dashboards within Splunk
How We Can Help
Q & A
1
2
3
4
5

17. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
AGENDA
Introductions
Common Jira Performance Degradation & Failure Mechanisms
Live Demo: Atlassian Application Dashboards within Splunk
How We Can Help
Q & A
1
2
3
4
5

18. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
How We Can Help
Atlassian + Splunk Professional Services
 Agile
 SAFe
 xDD
 Hybrid
 DevOps
 Training
 Coaching
 Staffing
 Certifications
 Collaboration

19. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
AGENDA
Introductions
Common Jira Performance Degradation & Failure Mechanisms
Live Demo: Atlassian Application Dashboards within Splunk
How We Can Help
Q & A
1
2
3
4
5

20. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Learn More:
www.cprime.com
To help teams produce the extraordinary
Thank you!
Q & A Questions? Email us at
marketing@cprime.com

21. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
APPENDIX
Additional Case Studies

22. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Monitor JVM Garbage
Collection Logs
… and monitor response
times over time, correlating
with changes made to
garbage collection settings
Suboptimal JVM Tuning
Case Study
Your IT team recognizes that Jira has
been slow. So they increase the
amount of memory available in JVM.
It didn’t solve the problem.
Users are reporting that “Jira is slow”.

23. © All Rights Reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. www.cprime.com
Monitor Web Proxy
Response Times
… and correlate with
geographic lookups by IP
address
Geography –Specific Network Problems
Case Study
Your new development team in Europe
isn’t using Jira because they claim it’s
slow and unusable.
Is this really a problem unique to
Poland, or are the new developers just
allergic to our process?
Only certain users are reporting that
“Jira is slow”.