Jira Software 8.4.x upgrade notes

Here are some important notes on upgrading to Jira Software 8.4.

For details on the new features and improvements in this release, see the Jira Software 8.4.x release notes. 

 Upgrade notes

Here's a summary of changes and important notes from Jira 8.4.

Increase pool-max-size on upgrade

If you're upgrading from Jira 7.x to Jira 8.x we recommend changing the pool-max-size parameter to 40 in your dbconfig.xml before the upgrade. Leaving the default of 20 can sometimes lead to “ResultSet Closed” errors during re-indexing on 8.x. For information on implementing the change, see Tuning database connections.

Features

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 here.

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. But worry not. You do not need to restart Jira after editing the templates. 

Here’s how to do it:

• Customizing email content (batched notifications)
• Adding custom fields to emails (batched notifications)

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 available also for Jira Server. 

For more information, see Data Center monitoring.

Security

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 the default in Jira 8.4 and is no longer a dark feature.

Read more about the changes:

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracore/gdpr-changes-in-jira-975041009.html#GDPRchangesinJira-userkeys 1 
• https://blog.developer.atlassian.com/important-gdpr-changes-in-jira-server/ 1

Databases

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 here. 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.

Infrastructure

Tomcat upgrade

We're upgrading Tomcat to version 8.5.42.

 End of support announcements

In Jira 8.4, we're making the following changes:

• Deprecation of Jira native importers. We have dropped support for several native importers that used to be available as part of 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 has been reported to cause issues especially on larger instances. That is why we decided to remove this endpoint in Jira 9.0. In Jira 8.4 we'll make other calls available to mitigate the issue. Read more...

• Advance notice: end of support for Internet Explorer 11

  To allow us to continue to take advantage of modern web standards to deliver improved functionality and the best possible user experience across all of our products, we have decided to end support for Internet Explorer 11. 

  Jira 8.5 will be the last version to support Internet Explorer. 

  See End of support announcements for full details. 

 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. For a more tailored upgrade, go to  > 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.