Jira Service Management 4.18.x upgrade notes

Below are some important notes on upgrading to Jira Service Management 4.18. For details on the new features and improvements in this release, see:

• Jira Service Management 4.18.x release notes

 Upgrade notes

Here's some important information you should know about:

4.18.1: Bundled JRE disables secure connections to MySQL Community Edition 5.7.27 or older over TLS versions 1 and 1.1

Jira Service Management 4.18.1 binary installers are bundled with the AdoptOpenJDK 8u291 JRE, which ships with TLS versions 1 and 1.1 disabled by default. This prevents secure connections with MySQL Community Edition 5.7.27 or older compiled with yaSSL.

To ensure that Jira can establish a secure connection with your MySQL database after the upgrade, switch to a version of MySQL Community Edition that supports TLS 1.2. You can choose one of the following solutions:

Recommended solution: Upgrade to MySQL Community Edition 5.7.28 or newer

Because the binary distributions of MySQL Community Edition 5.7.27 and older are compiled with yaSSL, they do not support TLS 1.2 by default. We recommend that you upgrade to MySQL Community Edition 5.7.28 or newer (this version uses the OpenSSL library), and then allow secure connections over TLS 1.2 by either:

• Upgrading the MySQL Connector/J driver to version 8.0.19 or newer.
• Adding the enabledTLSProtocols=TLSv1.2 parameter to the MySQL JDBC connection string in dbconfig.xml.

For more information, see:

• MySQL 5.7 Reference Manual — 2.11 Upgrading MySQL
• 2023-03-06_08-25-28_Connecting Jira applications to MySQL 5.7

Solution 2: Recompile MySQL Community Edition 5.7.27 or older with OpenSSL

Alternatively, you can recompile version MySQL Community Edition 5.7.27 or older with OpenSSL, and then allow secure connections over TLS 1.2 by either:

• Upgrading the MySQL Connector/J driver to version 8.0.19 or newer.
• Adding the enabledTLSProtocols=TLSv1.2 parameter to the MySQL JDBC connection string in dbconfig.xml.

For more information, see:

• MySQL 5.7 Reference Manual — 2.9.6 Configuring SSL Library Support
• 2023-03-06_08-25-28_Connecting Jira applications to MySQL 5.7

Solution 3: Re-enable TLS 1 and 1.1 in Java

If required, you can re-enable support for TLS 1 and TLS 1.1 in Java by removing the TLSv1 and TLSv1.1 entries from the jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms property in <JAVA_HOME>/lib/security/java.security.

Disable the PacClient on startup

Use this temporary workaround only if you installed Jira Service Management 4.18.0. This problem has been fixed in 4.18.1.

Jira Service Management 4.18.0 had a known issue that affected Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) cache invalidation and rendered Jira unresponsive after a few hours since startup.

To prevent Jira from becoming unresponsive, disconnect it from the Atlassian Marketplace:

1. Select Administration > Manage apps.

2. At the bottom of the page, select Settings.

3. Clear the Connect to the Atlassian Marketplace checkbox and select Apply.

In clustered Data Center configurations, the change is propagated to all nodes in the cluster.

Alternatively, you can restart Jira with the -Dupm.pac.disable=true startup option enabled. See Setting properties and options on startup. If you’re running Jira Data Center in a cluster, repeat this step on each node.

Cannot upgrade to 4.18 directly if you use the H2 database

In this release we've upgraded the embedded H2 database, which is often used when evaluating Jira. This is a significant upgrade which contains some breaking changes. 

If you attempt to upgrade a Jira instance running on the embedded H2 database, the upgrade will fail and your instance will not be accessible until you roll back the upgrade. We recommend you check your database before upgrading, as rolling back can take considerable effort.  

Check whether you are using H2

To check whether you're using the embedded database go to  > System > Troubleshooting and support tools and make sure the database health checks are passing.  If you are using the H2 database, the Embedded database check will fail. 

Migrate your data to a supported database

If you are using H2 in production, you will need to migrate to a supported external database before upgrading to Jira Service Management 4.18. 

See Switching databases for a step by step guide. 

Changes to the data pipeline

We’ve made a few changes to the data pipeline that you should be aware of:

• We now export issue history and custom field data by default. This will significantly increase your export duration. In our tests we found it took approximately 22 hours to export 7 million issues.

• The fromDate value is now silently truncated to minutes, ignoring any seconds and milliseconds. This is to avoid inconsistencies between the issue and issue history files.

Upgrading Insight - Asset Management

Insight - Asset Management has been part of Jira Service Management Data Center since version 4.15. When you upgrade to the new version, Insight will be upgraded automatically without any issues. However, if you were using this app on earlier versions (or if you're using an equivalent Insight app from Marketplace), you might need to complete some pre-upgrade steps.

For more info about the steps, see Upgrading Insight with Jira Service Management.

 End of support announcements

There are no changes to supported platforms in this release. Here are our plans for the future:

• Deprecating PostgreSQL 9.6: We're deprecating PostgreSQL 9.6, and plan to remove it in Jira Service Management 4.19.

• Deprecating Microsoft Edge Legacy: After introducing support for Microsoft Edge (Chromium), we’re deprecating Microsoft Edge Legacy, but you can still use it with this version.

For the list of supported platforms, see Supported platforms.

 App developers

See Preparing for Jira 8.18 for any important changes regarding apps.

 Upgrade procedure

To help you upgrade to the latest and greatest:

• See Upgrading Jira applications for complete upgrade procedures, including all available upgrade methods and pre-upgrade steps. 
• For a more tailored upgrade, go to Jira administration > Applications > Plan your upgrade. We’ll recommend a version to upgrade to, run pre-upgrade checks, and provide you with a custom upgrade guide with step-by-step instructions.