Jira Service Desk 4.4.x upgrade notes
Below are some important notes on upgrading to Jira Service Desk 4.4. For details on the new features and improvements in this release, see the Jira Service Desk 4.4 release notes.
Summary of changes
Upgrade notes
Here's a summary of changes and important notes from Jira Service Desk 4.4.
Persistent cache to automation app requires memory increase
We've added a caching layer to our automation module, which significantly improves the read speed for large Jira Service Desk instances with lots of automation rules and projects. If you were regularly using the maximum memory available and notice slowness after upgrade, you may need to increase Jira's application memory.
Email notifications batched by default
Email notifications are now batched by default. This means that your users will no longer receive separate notifications for every event, but instead get a summary of notifications for recent events. You can read more about this feature at Configuring email notifications.
Important: If you customized how your notifications look by editing the Velocity templates, your customizations will no longer work. That’s because batched notifications are using different templates. You will need to reapply your changes to these new templates.
Here’s how to do it:
- Customizing email content (batched notifications)
- 2020-11-23_14-28-20_Adding custom fields to emails (batched notifications)
Emails that Jira Service Desk customers receive notifying them of activity on their request are not impacted by Jira email batching, and will still be sent approximately every minute.
New monitors for Jira Data Center
We've created a brand new set of monitors and alerts to help you analyze performance bottlenecks and avoid outages. Now, you can monitor slow HTTP requests, slow jobs, high pool utilization, slow and complex JQL and database, and abandoned connections.
The JQL monitors are also available for Jira Server. For more information, see Jira Data Center monitoring.
Updates to permissions required
To maximize the security of your data, we’ve made the Public Sharing feature OFF by default. We also recommend that you revise your filter, dashboards and user permissions so that sensitive data remains secure. See Control anonymous user access.
Extra security for Jira
We’ve introduced extra security measures to make sure issue attachments and issue keys are safe and inaccessible for anonymous users.
Generating user keys becomes default
We have introduced a new way of generating user keys for new users. The reason behind it is that we want to reduce the number of places where we store users’ personal data.
Up to now, the user key has been the same as username, lowercased. For example, user Admin got a user key admin. If there’s been a naming conflict, the user key has been set to a value like ID10100.
We’re now changing this approach so that all user keys for new users (no changes for existing users) have the following format: JIRAUSER10100. This approach becomes default in Jira 8.4 and is no longer a dark feature.
Read more about the changes at:
New Oracle versions, new JDBC driver
We've added support for new Oracle versions—18c and 19c. If you want to use these versions, see Connecting Jira to Oracle to make them work with your Jira.
While working on this, we've upgraded the JDBC driver that we're using to test Jira with Oracle to JDBC 19.3 (ojdbc8). To be safe, you should also upgrade your driver. This applies to all Oracle versions. You can get the driver from the Oracle website. For more info on what's supported, see Supported platforms.
Support for Aurora for Data Center
We’re adding support for Aurora PostgreSQL for Jira Data Center.
PostgreSQL 9.3 will no longer work
We’ve stopped supporting PostgreSQL 9.3 back in Jira 8.0, but it was still possible to use it with Jira. If you’re one of those who stayed with this database version, now it’s time to upgrade, as Jira 8.4 does not work with PostgreSQL 9.3. For the list of supported databases, see Supported platforms.
Tomcat upgrade
We're upgrading Tomcat to version 8.5.42.
End of support announcements
We're making the following changes:
- Deprecation of Jira native importers. We've dropped support for several native importers that were available as part of the Jira Importers Plugin (JIM). As of Jira 8.4, we're only supporting import from CSV and JSON.
- Advance notice: Createmeta REST endpoint will soon be removed. This endpoint is commonly used when Atlassian products are integrated to create issues in Jira from a Confluence, Fisheye, or Bitbucket instance. However, /jira/rest/api/2/issue/createmeta?params have been reported to cause issues, especially on larger instances. That's why we've decided to remove this endpoint in Jira 9.0. In Jira 8.4, we'll make other calls available to mitigate the issue. Learn more
For more information, see End of support announcements.
App developers
See Preparing for Jira 8.4 for any important changes regarding apps.
Upgrade procedure
See Upgrading Jira applications for complete upgrade procedures, including all available upgrade methods and pre-upgrade steps that are required for Jira Service Desk 4.4. For a more tailored upgrade, also check our Pre-upgrade planning tool that will recommend a version to upgrade to, run pre-upgrade checks, and provide you with a custom upgrade guide with step-by-step instructions.