Jira 9.4 Long Term Support release upgrade guide

• 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.

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

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