- Created by Unknown User (ketkee.aryamane), last updated on Jun 05, 2020 7 minute read
Understand and learn to configure general settings for Insight in Jira for both server and data center versions.
Server Configuration
The subsequent sections describe all Insight properties that will work globally for your installation.
General Configuration
Click on the cog wheel at the far right corner of your Jira instance and choose Manage apps option.
Click on Insight Configuration on the left panel. You will now get to the General Insight Configuration screen as shown below.

The following table describes all the configuration properties on this page in detail.
Name | Description | Change requires a Jira restart |
|---|---|---|
Attribute default label | The text type attribute to be used as default label for every object type. You can change this on the specific object type configuration too. Note that this affects only for those object types that are created after this setting has changed. | No |
Attribute default description | The description for the default label attribute. You can change this on the specific object type configuration too. | No |
Open Object dialog event | Determines if the object dialog should open when a user clicks on an object link or when the user hovers with the mouse over an object link. This will also apply when you view Insight object fields while you view a Jira issue. | No |
Default number of objects fetched in custom fields | This indicates the number of objects that Insight will fetch in custom fields for each request. The default value is set to 25. Once the user starts to search any objects on the custom field, more objects matching the search criteria are fetched from server asynchronously. Hence, the default limit of 25 is recommended and should be enough. If you increase this number, it will affect the performance since more objects would then have to be fetched on every request. | No |
Insight Audit Log enabled | If you check this checkbox, it is ensured that all Insight object events are logged to an audit log file. | No |
Include attribute values in audit log | This checkbox is enabled only if the above "Insight Audit Log enabled" is checked. If checked, this will include all attribute values of an object in the audit log. | No |
Restore Insight index from file | This will ensure that on start up, Insight index will be restored from a file. This will help increase the startup time. Insight will perform a consistency check of the file against the database on startup and recreate the index if they mismatch. If you uncheck this, you may experience a slower start up time. However, it could remove the risk of a potential corrupted index file which may cause data inconsistency. By default, this is checked. The file is located at {$JIRA_HOME/caches/insight_indexes} E.g, path of the file on MacOS will be {/var/atlassian/application-data/jira/caches/insight_indexes} | No |
Store cache on shutdown | This indicates that the Insight index should be persisted to a file on Insight shutdown (e.g, in cases of a plugin upgrade, Jira restart, Insight disable etc). It is recommended that if "Restore Insight index from file" is checked, this property should be switched on too. | No |
Restrict Insight Cache | This helps to limit the amount of objects allowed to be stored in Insight. This will subsequently limit the memory footprint by allowing only a limited number of objects to reside in the cache. The default and recommended way to use Insight is to not restrict objects in cache. The limit will have negative performance impact. | Yes |
Number of objects allowed in cache | This is enabled only if "Restrict Insight Cache" is checked. This property indicates the number of Insight objects that will be be stored in the cache. The recommended way is to not limit objects in cache. | Yes |
Maximum File upload size | The maximum file upload size in bytes when uploading files, images, attachments into Insight. | No |
Insight parallelism | This is number of threads that Insight will spawn to perform parallel tasks, e.g, importing data, re-indexing etc. If this number is set to a lower value, Insight will put less strain on Jira. However, it will come at the cost of a low performance speed. | No |
Process data sources via temp files during imports | Temporarily store data on disk when using the import modules to reduce memory footprint during import. (This is available from version 5.5.7) | No |
| Use a custom locale for Insight | This is used to indicate if the data stored in Insight should be sorted by a locale other than Jira's default one. Fetching of objects may be slower if this option is switched on. Hence, by default, this is disabled to avoid performance issues. | No |
| The locale for Insight | This is enabled only if "Use a custom locale for Insight" is checked. This determines the language Insight should use when sorting data. | No |
Jira Service Desk - Following properties only apply if you have installed Jira Service Desk on your Jira instance.
Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
Service Desk portal search text (single) | Placeholder for the Insight field on the Jira Service Desk portals (Single fields) | |
Service Desk portal search text (multi) | Placeholder for the Insight field on the Jira Service Desk portals (Multiple fields) |
Change date settings
All dates in Insight uses the Jira administrator settings and can be changed here in Jira:
/secure/admin/AdvancedApplicationProperties.jspa
Insight does not provide an option to override the default date settings.
Locate log files
Insight Server logs are located at: JIRA_HOME/log/
Index Insight
Click on Indexing Insight on the left panel. You will be able to configure the indexing options for Insight as shown below.

On startup, Insight will re-index itself.
Insight will first try to read any persisted index from disk. In cases where the index is not found or the index is corrupted, Insight will perform a re-index.
Insight offers the following options for indexing:
Clean re-index
A clean re-index means that all objects will be evicted from the index and objects will be indexed again. This is recommended if you want to have a fresh state of the index. Remember that objects cannot be filtered or found during this time.
Re-index
A normal re-index means that all objects will continue to stay in index and Insight will re-index every object until all objects are reindexed. You can filter objects normally during this time.
Persist Insight index to file
You can manually persist the Insight index on your disk. In cases where you have a big Insight environment with a huge number of objects, you can persist the Insight index, before any uninstall / re-install. This ensures that the Insight index is persisted before Jira can perform a kill operation on the Insight app during shutdown.
Test your groovy scripts
Click on Insight Script Console on the left panel and you should see a console as shown below.

Insight provides a quick utility for you to test out your groovy scripts that you want to use in Automation or post functions in Insight.
Synchronize your reports
Click on Insight reports on the left panel. You will see an option to synchronize your reports as shown below.

You can set up a cron schedule which then runs a job to synchronise the data in your reports.
Enable/Disable analytics
Click on Mindville Analytics on the left panel. You can enable/disable data analytics that Mindville creates on your data usage.

Data Center Configuration
General Configuration
All the General Configuration for Data center is same as that for the server version. A couple specific ones are mentioned below:
Name | Description | Change requires a Jira restart |
|---|---|---|
| Dedicated Scheduling Node | This node will be the dedicated node to execute Insight scheduling tasks, such as Importers, Automation, etc. Note that, if a node was selected as the dedicated scheduling node and happens to be unavailable at the time of running a scheduled task, then that task will not run. | No |
| Store cache on shutdown | This is generally switched on if the "Restore Insight index from file" is checked. In some data center use cases though, this could be toggled to off. | No |
Locate log files
Insight Data center logs are located at: /jira-shared-home/log/
Configure data retention period for clustermessage table
This configuration is required for any Insight Data center version starting 8.5.1 and onwards and explicitly for version 6.4.11.
As suggested by Atlassian - a way to avoid this is to add a service that flushes the table every 12 hours, retaining the data for only 2880 minutes (or exactly 48 hours). This should prevent performance issues resulting from overloading of the clustermessage table.If you import large datasets in Insight for Data Center in a short period of time, the clustermessage table will be filled up with information and can cause performance issues.
To configure the data retention period, execute the following steps. Screenshot is shown below for reference.
- Click the cogwheel at far right to view the Jira Administration options and select System.
- Scroll down to the Advanced section and select Services.
- Under Add Service, under Class, select Build-in services.
- Click on Cluster messaging flush service.
- Enter the following information:
- Name - Cluster Messaging Flush Service
- Class - com.atlassian.jira.service.services.cluster.ClusterMessageCleaningService
- Schedule - 0 0 4/12 * * ?
- Click Add Service.
- Enter the following for Retention Period - 2880m
- Click Update.

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