Summary

Occasionally, when you upgrade or try to install JIRA, you may run into an error whereby JIRA can't access or confirm your license. When JIRA attempts to start, you'll be presented with an error confirming this.

This error relates to both Jira Software and Jira Service Management applications. When running both applications, we should ensure both the licenses are valid, otherwise, the supported versions will be only those that are released before the license expiry date. As an example scenario if JSW/JSM license has expired on 02/12/19, you will only be able to upgrade to Jira versions that were released prior to the date. 

For Jira Service Management:

License Too Old For Build: We found a problem with your JIRA license
Your current JIRA Service Desk license doesn't allow you to upgrade to this version of JIRA (8.6.1). JIRA Service Desk expired on 02/12/2019 mm:ss, and you can currently only upgrade to versions released prior to this date. Alternatively you can renew your license at my.atlassian.com which will allow you to upgrade to this version of JIRA (8.6.1). You can enter your new license here.

For Jira Software:

License Too Old For Build: We found a problem with your JIRA license
Your current Jira Software license doesn't allow you to upgrade to this version of JIRA (8.6.1). Jira Software expired on 02/12/2019 mm:ss, and you can currently only upgrade to versions released prior to this date. Alternatively you can renew your license at my.atlassian.com which will allow you to upgrade to this version of JIRA (8.6.1). You can enter your new license here.

Here are the possible solutions to workaround these types of scenarios.

Solution 1:

The solution is to obtain a valid license for your instance from My Atlassian, insert it into the relevant field, and restart JIRA.

When using both JSW/JSM together and in specific cases where you are not using one of the applications JSW/JSM and wouldn't prefer to upgrade/remove it, for example: if only JSW is in use and not JSM then you can remove the license information from the GUI and then remove/de-activate the unused application before the upgrade to prevent this error during startup.

Solution 2 (applicable only in specific scenarios):

Since Jira stores the license keys in the Jira database, it will have records of expired license keys, which might create blockers if not removed from the GUI. Sometimes, it's possible that the unused application (JSW/JSM/Jira Core) is removed from the setup, but an expired license key is still present in the tables that are being validated by the application during start-up. In such cases, unused license keys can be removed to fix the issue.

Disclaimer: When using the above approach, make sure that the application is stopped and the database backups are captured before making any changes. 

• In order to either update the license key or remove the license key via GUI, you need to have JSW/JSM installed in order to have those options in Jira's UPM or Versions & Licenses page (depending on the version of Jira).

• If this is a test upgrade, then way is to get around this problem is to return to the original installation that has JSW/JSM installed, and delete the license key from this Jira site for specific product.  For example: If the source was a Jira 7.x/JSD 3.x and later this could be done from the Cog Icon -> Applications -> Versions and Licenses page, provided respective JSW/JSM application installed.

• If this isn't a test instance, or you don't want to have to revert/rollback the upgrade, you could try to use the KB How to Get and Update JIRA License String from the Database. This KB explains how you can find the license keys for Jira Core, JSW and JSM in the database. The SQL query for any Jira 7.X versions or higher would be: 

SELECT * FROM productlicense;

• This will return the Jira application licenses in your database. Now you need to be careful here because you don't want to remove your valid application license here, but it should be possible for you to delete the records in this table that contains the unused/expired license key. If you are not sure which is which, you should be able to compare the string in that field against your known license key and then remove the other row from this table.

• If at stage there is a confusion or didn't get enough clarity, please reach out to Atlassian Support for any assistance required to ensure flawless operations.