User Management Limitations and Recommendations

This page describes the optimal configurations and limitations that apply to user management in JIRA.

On this page:

The information on this page does not apply to JIRA OnDemand.

General Recommendations

Duplicate usernames across directories are not recommended. If you are connecting to more than one user directory, the duplicate username listed in the first directory takes precedence. For example, if you have a username jsmith in both 'Directory1' and 'Directory2', the entry from 'Directory2' is ignored.

Be careful when deleting users in remote directories. If you are connecting to an LDAP directory, a Crowd directory or a remote JIRA directory, please take care when deleting users from the remote directory. If you delete a user that is associated with data in JIRA, this will cause problems in JIRA. We recommend that you perform all user management in JIRA, because the JIRA UI will prevent the deletion of a user if there are issues assigned to the user, reported by the user or the user is a project lead.

Recommendations for Connecting to LDAP

Please consider the following limitations and recommendations when connecting to an LDAP user directory.

Optimal Number of Users and Groups in your LDAP Directory

The connection to your LDAP directory provides powerful and flexible support for connecting to, configuring and managing LDAP directory servers. To achieve optimal performance, a background synchronisation task loads the required users and groups from the LDAP server into the application's database, and periodically fetches updates from the LDAP server to keep the data in step. The amount of time needed to copy the users and groups rises with the number of users, groups, and group memberships. For that reason, we recommended a maximum number of users and groups as described below.

This recommendation affects connections to LDAP directories:

Microsoft Active Directory
All other LDAP directory servers

The following LDAP configurations are not affected:

Internal directories with LDAP authentication
LDAP directories configured for 'Authentication Only, Copy User On First Login'

Please choose one of the following solutions, depending on the number of users, groups and memberships in your LDAP directory.

Your environment	Recommendation
Up to 10 000 (ten thousand) users, 1000 (one thousand) groups, and 20 (twenty) groups per user	Choose the 'LDAP' or 'Microsoft Active Directory' directory type. You can make use of the full synchronisation option. Your application's database will contain all the users and groups that are in your LDAP server.
More than the above	Use LDAP filters to reduce the number of users and groups visible to the synchronisation task.

Our Test Results

We performed internal testing of synchronisation with an AD server on our local network consisting of 10 000 users, 1000 groups and 200 000 memberships.

We found that the initial synchronisation took about 5 minutes. Subsequent synchronisations with 100 modifications on the AD server took a couple of seconds to complete.

Please keep in mind that a number of factors come into play when trying to tune the performance of the synchronisation process, including:

Size of userbase. Use LDAP filters to keep this to the minimum that suits your requirements.
Type of LDAP server. We currently support change detection in AD, so subsequent synchronisations are much faster for AD than for other LDAP servers.
Network topology. The further away your LDAP server is from your application server, the more latent LDAP queries will be.
Database performance. As the synchronisation process caches data in the database, the performance of your database will affect the performance of the synchronisation.
JVM heap size. If your heap size is too small for your userbase, you may experience heavy garbage collection during the synchronisation process which could in turn slow down the synchronisation.

Redundant LDAP is Not Supported

The LDAP connections do not support the configuration of two or more LDAP servers for redundancy (automated failover if one of the servers goes down).

Specific Notes for Connecting to Active Directory

When the application synchronises with Active Directory (AD), the synchronisation task requests only the changes from the LDAP server rather than the entire user base. This optimises the synchronisation process and gives much faster performance on the second and subsequent requests.

On the other hand, this synchronisation method results in a few limitations:

Externally moving objects out of scope or renaming objects causes problems in AD. If you move objects out of scope in AD, this will result in an inconsistent cache. We recommend that you do not use the external LDAP directory interface to move objects out of the scope of the sub-tree, as defined on the application's directory configuration screen. If you do need to make structural changes to your LDAP directory, manually synchronise the directory cache after you have made the changes to ensure cache consistency.
Synchronising between AD servers is not supported. Microsoft Active Directory does not replicate the uSNChanged attribute across instances. For that reason, we do not support connecting to different AD servers for synchronisation. (You can of course define multiple different directories, each pointing to its own respective AD server.)
Synchronising with AD servers behind a load balancer is not supported. As with synchronising between two different AD servers, Microsoft Active Directory does not replicate the uSNChanged attribute across instances. For that reason, we do not support connecting to different AD servers even when they are load balanced. You will need to select one server (preferably one that is local) to synchronise with instead of using the load balancer.
You must restart the application after restoring AD from backup. On restoring from backup of an AD server, the uSNChanged timestamps are reverted to the backup time. To avoid the resulting confusion, you will need to flush the directory cache after a Active Directory restore operation.
Obtaining AD object deletions requires administrator access. Active Directory stores deleted objects in a special container called cn=Deleted Objects. By default, to access this container you need to connect as an administrator and so, for the synchronisation task to be aware of deletions, you must use administrator credentials. Alternatively, it is possible to change the permissions on the cn=Deleted Objects container. If you wish to do so, please see this Microsoft KB Article.
The User DN used to connect to AD must be able to see the uSNChanged attribute. The synchronisation task relies on the uSNChanged attribute to detect changes, and so must be in the appropriate AD security groups to see this attribute for all LDAP objects in the subtree.

Recommendations for Connecting to Another JIRA Server

Please consider the following limitations and recommendations when connecting to a JIRA server for user management.

Single Sign-On Across Multiple Applications is Not Supported

When you connect to JIRA for user management, you will not have single sign-on across the applications connected in this way. JIRA, when acting as a directory manager, does not support SSO.

Custom Application Connectors are Not Supported

JIRA, Confluence, FishEye, Crucible and Bamboo can connect to a JIRA server for user management. Custom application connectors will need to use the new REST API.

Custom Directories are Not Supported

Earlier versions of JIRA supported OSUser Providers. It was therefore possible write a special provider to obtain user information from any external user directory. This is no longer the case.

Optimal Number of Users and Applications

Please consider the following limitations when connecting to a JIRA server for user management:

Maximum 500 users.
Maximum 5 connected applications.

Recommendations

Your environment

Recommendation

If all the following are true:

You have fewer than 500 users.
You want to share user and group management across just a few applications, such as one JIRA server and one Confluence server, or two JIRA servers.
You do not need single sign-on (SSO) between JIRA and Confluence, or between two JIRA servers.
You do not have custom application connectors. Or, if you do have them, you are happy to convert them to use the new REST API.
You are happy to shut down all your servers when you need to upgrade JIRA.

Your environment meets the optimal requirements for using JIRA for user management.

If one or more of the following are true:

You have more than 500 users.
You want to share user and group management across more than 5 applications.
You need single sign-on (SSO) across multiple applications.
You have custom applications integrated via the Crowd SOAP API, and you cannot convert them to use the new REST API.
You are not happy to shut down all your servers when you need to upgrade JIRA.

We recommend that you install Atlassian Crowd for user management and SSO.

If you are considering creating a custom directory connector to define your own storage for users and groups...

Please see if one of the following solutions will work for you:

If you have written a custom provider to support a specific LDAP schema, please check the supported LDAP schemas to see if you can use one of them instead.
If you have written a custom provider to support nested groups, please consider enabling nested groups in the supported directory connectors instead.
If you have written a custom provider to connect to your own database, please consider loading the data into the application's database instead.
If you need to keep the custom directory connection, please consider whether Atlassian Crowd meets your requirements. See the documentation on Creating a Custom Directory Connector.

Child pages