Symptoms

The rate of growth of data in your DB has drastically increased. You find this coming from the changeitem table. You use the Automation plugin in your instance.

Diagnosis

The query will tell you the amount of data being created in the changeitem table by month. You could adjust WHERE clause and set "...and ci.field NOT in..."  to query for the data being created by everything which is not Service Management. If you see a huge spike like for some of month, then you are potentially affected by this issue.

select 
  date_trunc('month', cg.created), 
  sum(coalesce(pg_column_size(ci.oldstring),0)) 
  + sum(coalesce(pg_column_size(ci.newstring),0)) 
  as total 
from 
  changegroup as cg, 
  changeitem as ci 
where 
  ci.groupid = cg.id 
  and ci.field in (
    select 
      cfname 
    from 
      customfield 
    where 
      customfieldtypekey like 'com.atlassian.servicedesk%'
  ) 
group by 
  date_trunc('month', cg.created) 
order by 
  date_trunc('month', cg.created)

 Queries are only written for PostgreSQL. If you use a different SQL server, you will need to adjust the queries for your db.

Cause

This is a bug in the combination of how the Automation plugin and Jira Service Management work together. Issue was tracked at:  JSD-1060 - Getting issue details... STATUS

Workaround

You can delete the bad data from the DB. We recommend performing a VACUUM / ANALYZE after the deletion completes.

delete from changegroup where id in (select id from changegroup where 
id in (select groupid from changeitem where field  in 
    (select cfname from customfield 
		where customfieldtypekey like 'com.atlassian.servicedesk%'))
except
    (select groupid from changeitem where field not in 
    (select cfname from customfield 
		where customfieldtypekey like 'com.atlassian.servicedesk%')));

delete from changeitem 
	where field in 
		(select cfname from customfield 
			where customfieldtypekey like 'com.atlassian.servicedesk%');

 Queries are only written for PostgreSQL. If you use a different SQL server, you will need to adjust the queries for your db.

Resolution

Per JSD-1060 - Getting issue details... STATUS you need to upgrade to Jira Service Management 2.1+ to fix this issue.