The guide to managing Jira configurations at scale with CMJ

Your go-to Jira app for change management, governance, and data migration

If keeping a healthy Jira instance is what you are tasked with, you have an essential role and often challenging responsibilities, such as planning for change management, migrating to new servers or platforms, or maintaining overall Jira instance health.

In addition, you have to test configuration changes, orchestrate user acceptance testing, remove unused or duplicate configurations, and fix errors. 

And all this has to be done with minimal downtime and no impact on the company.

Configuration Manager for Jira (CMJ) is a powerful configuration app that enables you to accomplish these tasks easily – all through automation, quick fixes, change and impact analysis, change roll-back, and audit logging.

Let’s take a quick look at CMJ’s features and capabilities.

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Daily change management

Reinforced with robust change and impact analysis, roll-back protection, and audit logs, Configuration Manager for Jira automates the promotion of configuration changes between Test, Staging, and Production environments with transparency and complete data integrity. 

Test – Staging – Production

CMJ supports IT’s best practice – testing and staging any changes before applying them on the Production server. It ensures that you safely – and accurately – update workflows, screens, and other project settings.

Here is how it all works:

To learn more, visit this documentation page.

For Jira Data Center and Server. Coming soon to Jira Cloud.

Sync instances or create clones

Want to perform tests without compromising the integrity of your source system? Cloning Jira instances is the right method for that. You can then synchronize staging with production. 

CMJ allows you to have two identical Jira instances and safely run tests at any time without breaking the production instance.

Configuration integrity

Always be confident in the health of your Jira environment. Integrity Check, a standalone app, helps you detect and resolve any broken or duplicate configuration objects, references, and other inconsistencies.

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Enterprise migrations and merges

Configuration Manager for Jira is an industry’s go-to app for consolidations and moves between Jira Server, Jira Data Center, and Jira Cloud. It offers a clean UI and superior back-end engine, enabling admins to gain powerful insight and remain in complete control. 

Migration

With CMJ, you can migrate app data and configuration from one Jira instance to another – even with data from other marketplace apps – with zero data loss.

The process of transferring projects between Jira instances is entirely transparent. You can quickly transfer app data, including issue data, and all configurations from one Jira instance to another without compromising the existing structure or losing any data. All with Apps SPI, a powerful feature of Configuration Manager for Jira.

Learn how to perform migration from Jira Server to Cloud using CMJ.

Merge or split Jira servers

If you need to merge two or more Jira servers into one or split one huge instance into smaller ones, CMJ can help you do that.

Here is how CMJ helped a growing company migrate 200,000 Jira tickets and 2,200 users with full transparency and zero data loss.

To learn more on how to merge Jira servers, visit this documentation page.

Pre- and post-migration optimizations

CMJ lets you optimize your projects before and after migrations. Run Integrity Check before migration to resolve all configuration errors right on the source instance and avoid transferring them to the target. Use Power Admin to get crystal-clear visibility of everything optimized and ultimately have a trouble-free migration.

And did we mention all with zero data loss?

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Governance and scaling 

CMJ for Jira Server and Data Center supports Jira optimization, backup and archiving, delegated administration, and much more. Here are the features of CMJ that solve the most complex Jira administrator challenges:

Project templating

CMJ makes migrations easier. When you have to do similar migrations multiple times, using project templates with predefined settings and objects will help you immensely reduce the time you spend on each migration. To learn more, visit this documentation page.

Delegated administration

CMJ offers an elegant solution to the most complex Jira administration scenario – it gives non-admin users 100% flexibility to personally make configuration changes, while Jira administrators have 100% control over what changes are introduced to production.

True project archive

Two main business needs drive project archiving – performance and security regulations. Yet, archiving in Jira is a time-consuming and challenging job. Stop dealing with not working projects when exporting issues and start using true project archiving. That way, you are guaranteed to have everything working correctly. To learn more, visit this documentation page.

Backup and restore

When you need to make significant changes, create a backup first. You’ll be guaranteed that you can quickly restore your original configuration if anything breaks. To learn more, visit this documentation page. 

Audit, change and impact analysis

With CMJ, you get 100% accurate and detailed change analysis of all desired modifications. You can see how different changes will impact other projects and control whether to go through with them.

With the Audit feature in CMJ, everything that changes in the system during deployment is recorded. You’ll always have complete visibility and transparency into your Jira instance. To learn more, visit this documentation page. 

Built-in integrity check and roll-back

CMJ’s integrity check detects and prevents corrupted configuration from being deployed on a production server. The roll-back mechanism ensures that only working and validated by the administrator configurations are deployed.

Optimization

Optimize your Jira instances to get the highest performance. Use Integrity Check to detect and solve any problems, utilize Power Admin for super fast configuration analysis, or move projects from source to target quickly and effortlessly.

For Jira Data Center and Server

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How Configuration Manager for Jira works

Configuration Manager for Jira is the market leader for complete data portability of all configurations, all issue data, and data from third-party apps. With CMJ, the project configuration is fully transferred to the target instance with no data loss or capabilities.

Here is how CMJ works:

CMJ transfers app data and configurations from one Jira instance to another without compromising the existing structure or losing any data through “snapshots.” Think of snapshots like a “black box” of information that houses projects, issues, and configurations. You can create snapshots at the project level, with or without issues, or at the full system level. 

These snapshots can be created and deployed as needed, for daily change management tasks, or for larger projects like system migrations or merges. 

All data and configuration in the snapshot are server-independent, which means that it is portable and easily transferred to another Jira server.

For example, let’s say you get a change request to update a project workflow or screen for the Engineering team. You can test this configuration change on test and staging environments first to help you work out all the kinks before making the change in production. The change and impact analysis tell you exactly what’s changing and what impact occurs to existing configurations before making the change.

CMJ gives you the power to control and change how snapshots and target configuration elements are matched during a deployment. With two of CMJ’s most powerful features – Selective Merge and Custom Configuration Element Matching – you can choose to match a configuration element from a snapshot to a target element that is different from the default one.

To learn more about snapshots, read this documentation page.

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Even more powerful with other apps

Several other Appfire apps make Configuration Manager for Jira even more powerful.

Integrity Check

For Jira Server and Data Center

Integrity Check is a standalone app that detects and prevents corrupted configurations from being deployed on a production server. The app provides “quick fix” buttons to enable you to resolve these issues and proceed with your deployment quickly. To learn more about it, read this documentation page.

This paid app is included free with the purchase of CMJ

Power Admin

For Jira Server and Data Center

Power Admin is an advanced administration tool that allows you to search for configuration elements, see dependencies and usage, edit and configure components. It’s indispensable for system clean-up or performance tuning. 

This tool also enables you to merge custom fields. You can finally eliminate duplicate, legacy, and unnecessary custom fields without losing complete visibility on what will change and how your Jira configuration will look afterward. To learn more about merging custom fields, read this documentation page.

This paid app is included free with the purchase of CMJ

Configuration Manager Cloud Migration app

For Jira Server and Data Center

This free app pairs with Configuration Manager for Jira Cloud to help you migrate projects, users, workflows, issue data, attachments, and more to the Cloud. It installs on Jira Server to create a connection between your server and Cloud sites. Watch this video to learn how to perform migration from Jira Server to Cloud using CMJ and the Configuration Manager Cloud Migration Tool.

You can try Configuration Manager for Jira, along with the above apps, by navigating to this marketplace page.

Last updated: 2023-06-05

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Configuration Manager for Jira 

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