Issue Archiving with Exalate and Automation-For-Jira

    Introduction

    Jira is a highly effective issue-tracking system, allowing you to create and manage issues on the fly. Issues have a life cycle, and once resolved it is very unlikely that someone would ever revisit them in the future. Still, having these issues available for historical or compliancy reasons is really important. It is a fact that for some organizations (medical, financial, etc.) issues need to be kept available for 15 years or more.

    There are a number of approaches to resolving this issue.

    Keep the Issues on the Same Jira.

    By using an archiving permission scheme or an advanced issue security level it is possible to hide historical issues from day-to-day operations. These issues will not show up on the searches and dashboards users don't want to see

    Move the Issues to Another Jira

    Another approach is to move these issues to another Jira. They are still available for audit purposes, but these issues don't clog up the active Jira. Especially useful for service desk environments with 10000+ issues. A 10-user license is in many cases sufficient to host the archived issue


    Using Exalate to Move Issues from one Jira to Another

    Issues can easily be synchronized from one system to another. In the case of archival, you also want the issue to be removed from the active system. This move operation (which is equivalent to copy and delete) can be implemented with the Automation For Jira app, in combination with the Exalate Automation-For-Jira integration bridge.


    Configuring the Automation Rule

    Setting up the automation rule is straightforward

    • Create a rule
    • Add an action 'Exalate' and choose the migration connection setup in the previous step
    • Add an action 'Unexalate'
    • Add an action 'Delete' which removes the local issue
    • Call the rule 'Archive to red'

    The rule should look like