Jira Service Management 5.5.x release notes

6 December 2022

We're excited to present Jira Service Management 5.5.

Highlights

• Improved email filtering
• Auditing improvements for the customer portal and Assets
• Jira migrates to Log4j 2.x
• Audit log page improvements
• In-product diagnostics updates

• Jira Temporary Directory Cleaner introduced

• Support for Java 17 added
• H2 database upgraded from 1.4.200 to 2.1.214
• Resolved issues

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More

Read the Jira Service Management 5.5.x upgrade notes for important details about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.

Compatible applications

If you're looking for compatible Jira applications, look no further:

• Jira Software 9.5.x release notes
• Jira Software 9.5.x upgrade notes

Improved email filtering DATA CENTER

Jira admins now have more control over how email requests that your customers send are filtered by Jira Service Management.

The first change we’re introducing is giving admins the option to turn the auto-generated email and bulk email filters on or off, depending on your preferences. The new settings are available in Administration > Applications > Email requests.

We’ve also added a global allowlist and blocklist for all of your service projects. The lists let you decide which requests should always be processed and help you get rid of spam.

Use the allowlist to make sure that all emails sent from a specific domain are always processed by Jira Service Management, regardless of your filter settings. When you add a domain to your allowlist, any messages that originate from that domain will always reach your queue—either as new requests or as comments in existing ones. To manage your allowlist, go to Administration > Applications > Email requests > Allowlist.

If you get emails that are unwanted and end up cluttering your queue, the blocklist is the answer to your woes. Add email addresses or domains to your blocklist and stop worrying about spam in your queue. To manage your blocklist, go to Administration > Applications > Email requests > Blocklist.

Last but not least, you can now view all email channels that are used in your service projects in one convenient location. Go to Administration > Applications > Email requests > Email channels.

Check out the video below for a demo of the feature.

Learn more about receiving requests by email

Auditing improvements for the customer portal and Assets  DATA CENTER

As part of our ongoing efforts to increase audit log coverage across Jira Service Management, we’ve added new logs for several events in Assets and in the customer portal. Admins will now be able to track when Assets object types, objects, and attributes were created, edited or deleted, as well as see logs related to custom field updates. Audit logs will also include information on changes to the customer portal permissions and the customer portal itself (including name, logo and announcement updates).

Learn more about audit logs in Jira and Jira Service Management

Jira migrates to Log4j 2.x

To take the extra step to ensure continued compliance, we’ve upgraded Log4j to version 2.17.2.

Since this is a breaking change, some effort may be required to ensure that any existing custom Log4j 1.x configurations are compatible with this release of Jira:

• If you’re an app vendor and your app uses a custom Log4j 1.x configuration, you’ll need to update your code. For more information on what this means for you, see Log4j upgrade details for third-party app vendors.

• If you’re an admin using a custom Log4j 1.x configuration with your Jira instance, you’ll need to adjust the new log4j2.xml file to include those customizations. For more information about configuring Log4j 2, see Migrating from Log4j 1.x to 2.x and Configuring Log4j 2 in the official documentation.

Audit log page improvements

We’ve updated the Audit log feature for a faster loading experience.

Previously, the Audit log page in Jira loaded slowly for site and project admins if the database contained more than a few million events. This mostly affected the PostgresSQL and MySQL (including MariaDB) database types.

We’ve fixed this performance issue by incrementally caching the categories and summaries in new smaller database tables.

Learn more about auditing in Jira

In-product diagnostics updates: new user interface, REST API, and performance metrics

We’ve made a bunch of updates and improvements to the In-product diagnostics (IPD) tool to help admins monitor and maintain instance performance. You can now manage IPD monitoring manually in the user interface. 

We’ve added the /rest/api/2/monitoring/ipd endpoint for managing the IPD monitoring. We’ve also added HTTP connection and mail queue metrics for instance diagnostics. The metrics are available through JMX and the log file atlassian-jira-ipd-monitoring.log.

To manage IPD monitoring, go to Administration > System > System Support > Monitoring. You’ll see the new In-product diagnostics monitoring toggle.

Jira Temporary Directory Cleaner introduced

We’re introducing Jira Temporary Directory Cleaner to solve the issue of instances running out of space. With the help of the feature, during startup, Jira will automatically clean its temporary directory defined by the java.io.tmpdir property.

The Cleaner is disabled by default. To enable it, set the tmpdir.clean.on.startup property to true. You can do it by adding a new argument in the setenv.sh script:

-Dtmpdir.clean.on.startup=true.

Jira will clean the directory defined by the java.io.tmpdir property.

Due to safety reasons, Jira will attempt to remove files from this directory only when the temporary directory is a subdirectory of one of the following:

• Jira Home

• Catalina Base (defined by the catalina.base property)

• Catalina Home (defined by the catalina.home property)

Support for Java 17 added

We’ve added support for Java 17 to boost Jira performance and strengthen instance stability.

Make sure your Jira apps are updated to work on Java 17 and feel free to set up a new environment for Jira deployment.

H2 database upgraded from 1.4.200 to 2.1.214

We’ve upgraded the embedded database H2 from version 1.4.200 to version 2.1.214. The upgrade has fixed a bunch of vulnerability issues.

Make sure you’ve migrated your data to version 2.1.214 manually.

Learn more about how to migrate the data for the smooth upgrade

Resolved issues