Jira 9.4 Long Term Support release upgrade guide

A Long Term Support (LTS) release is a combo of smart updates and robust stability. With LTS releases, we provide continuous access to security, stability, data integrity, and performance issues until a version reaches the end of its life.

Why you should upgrade

Features highlight

Have a look at these key features
  • Automation for Jira is now part of Jira Software Data Center (Data Center): focus on the work that matters, removing the need to perform manual, repetitive tasks by allowing your teams to automate their processes and workflows.

  • Limit excessive activity with Safeguards (Data Center): If you rely heavily on automation, Safeguards can help you moderate a bot account group’s activity by limiting the number of comments every account in that group can add to an issue. Safeguards will also alert you by email if the number of comments in an issue is approaching the limit (either default or custom), the limit has been reached, or the limit has been exceeded.

  • Activity tabs improvements (Data Center): We’ve optimized the way activity items for the Comments, History, Work Logs, and All tabs are displayed and organized in the Jira issue view. We’ve fixed the sorting behavior and implemented incremental loading of tab contents.

  • Connect to Cloud products with secure application tunnels: Application tunnels use network tunneling to create a secure pathway between your organization in Atlassian Cloud and the products in your network. You can use this pathway to tunnel application links and integrate your products in a secure way.

  • Make your integrations more secure with OAuth 2.0: We’ve added a way to configure Jira as an OAuth 2.0 provider, allowing you to exchange data with external applications in both directions – either by giving external applications access to Jira data or letting Jira request data from these applications. OAuth 2.0 also paves the way for popular third-party apps to create their own connectors to be used specifically with Jira.

  • OAuth 2.0 Outgoing mail (SMTP): We’ve enabled OAuth 2.0 authorization for outgoing mail servers. Google and Microsoft are still supported as providers along with the SMTP protocol available for connection.

  • Diagnose and troubleshoot Jira on the fly with Java Flight Recorder: Java Flight Recorder is a lightweight diagnostic tool for analyzing and troubleshooting apps at runtime. The tool collects events from the Java Virtual Machine runtime and records them in a binary file. Once a recording is available, you can use the new troubleshooting and support tools settings to include Java Flight Recorder data in a support zip archive that you can send over to Atlassian Support for assistance.

  • Project picker search improvements: We’ve improved search performance in the project picker. The project picker now queries the backend as you type, returning only matching results. Empty queries or whitespaces are ignored.

  • Node scaling (Data Center): Index catch-up is now performed in multiple threads to increase scalability and speed up the node start-up on your Jira instance.

  • Performance improvements for Agile boards: We’ve improved the way how Jira handles Agile boards and loads sprints. Such actions as opening an Agile board and modifying sprints are completed much faster so you can focus on work without being interrupted by performance issues.

  • Exclude events from the audit log (Data Center): The new functionality allows excluding some audit events from being recorded in the log.

  • Keep your site running like clockwork with app monitoring: You can turn on application monitoring to get an even more granular view from the new app-specific metrics. This will help you diagnose performance problems at early stages or even before they happen and find timely solutions.

Check more accessibility highlights

We are especially pleased to share that this LTS release includes several accessibility updates. This upgrade remediates accessibility blockers and allows these users to complete essential tasks within Jira Software and Jira Service Management.

Jira Software has now resolved many critical issues for low-vision and keyboard-only users. Additionally, we have updated Assets functionality-related user accessibility in Jira Service Management and improved the overall user experience. View all of our closed JAC accessibility tickets here for JSW and here for JSM. For details, see Preparing for 9.4

Jira Service Management 5.4 features highlight

Want to know more about Jira Service Management 5.4 highlights? Check the JSM change log

Changes & improvements

Jira 9.4 comes with a number of changes, including features, supported platforms, and performance improvements:

Changes in supported platforms

By Jira 9.4, we’ve made changes to the following supported platforms:

  • Removed support for PostgreSQL 9.6, MySQL 5.7, and Microsoft Edge Legacy
  • Added support for Microsoft SQL Server 2019, PostgreSQL 12, PostgreSQL 14, and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL 14 (Data Center only)

Critical bugs fixes

Learn more about bug fixes in Jira 8.20 to Jira 9.4

End of Life policy

Atlassian supports feature versions for two years after the first major iteration of a version was released. Once a version reaches the end of life (EOL), you won't be able to receive support for it. Here are the EOL dates for Jira Long Term Support releases. Learn more

VersionEOL date
8.138 November 2022
8.2019 October 2023
9.48 November 2024

Compatible versions of your Atlassian suite

Make sure you know which Bamboo, Bitbucket, and Confluence versions are compatible with Jira 9.4 so that your stack is fully functional after the upgrade.

  • Bamboo: versions 8.0 and later
  • Bitbucket: versions 7.17 and later
  • Confluence: versions 7.19 and later
    • Before Confluence 7.17, there was an issue with this API endpoint that prevented full integration. The issue was fixed for Confluence 7.17, so make sure you’re upgrading to a more recent version. We recommend Confluence 7.19.

Upgrade procedure

Here's a summary of the upgrade path you'll be following.

Source version

8.5, 8.13, 8.20

Already on 9.x? Go to our regular upgrade guide

Upgrading from 7.x? Upgrade your Jira to version 8.13 first and proceed with upgrading from Jira 8.13 to Jira 9.4.

Target version9.4
Upgrade method and planned downtime
  • If you're upgrading from 8.x to 9.x, you should estimate and plan the downtime caused by Jira full reindex. Downtime duration depends on how many issues and apps you have in Jira. The Zero Downtime Upgrade method isn’t available. Learn more about downtime estimation
  • If your Jira Data Center is already on 9.x, you can upgrade by using the Zero Downtime Upgrade method and you don't need to plan the downtime. 

Follow these guides to prepare for the upgrade and complete it successfully.

Known issues

IssueSolution
After an upgrade to Jira 9.x, the Add comment button and the text box for new comments in issues are still showing at the bottom of the page, while the thread of comments is on top of them.

This is a known issue tracked in the ticket JRASERVER-74122 - Getting issue details... STATUS  

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

The performance check has shown some regression on the Browse Projects page starting from Jira 9.3. Due to this, the Browse Projects action performs around 10% slower, especially at scale on instances with a high number of projects.

This is a known issue we're going to fix in Jira 9.4.1. The issue is tracked in the ticket JRASERVER-74576 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

The user receives an error message when accessing Project settings if no Asset object schema exists and the user isn't in the jira-systems-administrators group.

This is a known issue tracked in the ticket JSDSERVER-12199 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

Some users get the following message while viewing Kanban boards: "Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'innerText')".

This is a known issue we're going to fix in Jira 5.4.1. The issue is tracked in the ticket JSDSERVER-12124 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

The user may experience typing inverted text in the Text Area Attribute field when in Asset Object View in Jira Service Management. 

This is a known issue in Jira Service Management (JSM) we're going to fix. The current workaround is to use Asset Schema View. This is tracked in JSDSERVER-12204 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

In Jira Service Management 5.3.0, free login on the customer portal was introduced. Because of this update, outgoing mail notifications might get delayed by many hours for any instance on JSM 5.3.0.

This is a known issue in Jira Service Management (JSM) we're going to fix. The issue is tracked in the ticket JSDSERVER-12279 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

In Jira Software, an outgoing mail configuration can't be saved using the JNDI Location setting. This issue impacts any Jira Server and Data Center version since Jira 9.2.

This is a known issue tracked in the ticket JRASERVER-74705 - Getting issue details... STATUS

In the ticket, you can find a workaround instruction to save your outgoing mail configurations.

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

The full reindex slows down for Jira 9.0.0. This is due to extra operations performed during Jira reindex that improve index correctness.

This is a known issue tracked in the ticket JRASERVER-74787 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Feel free to leave comments on the ticket so we know your use cases better and understand how this issue is impacting your operations.

Last modified on Nov 18, 2022

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