Forums

Articles
Create
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Migrate Automation from Jira Cloud to Jira Data Center

DenJr March 20, 2024

We are considering migrating from Jira Cloud to Jira Data Center. Will automations transfer successfully, what difficulties may arise, and how can they be addressed? Thank you!

2 answers

0 votes
Mykenna Cepek
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
March 6, 2025

Be warned: virtually every ID will be different (only the same as an extremely rare coincidence).

The gap here includes IDs for Projects, Statuses, Fields, Transitions, Components, Issue Types, Issue Link Types, Priorities, Resolutions, User IDs, etc.

Since automation rules internally use IDs specific to your Jira instance, that's what's exported into the JSON. Importing that same JSON into another instance results in all those IDs no longer matching.

Inspecting an imported rule might show a problem (unknown ID), which is the best case scenario. But often IDs will exist in both instances but map to different things, and then the imported rule does not show an error. But the imported rule will then work incorrectly.

We are in the midst of trying to mitigate about 200 automation rules while migrating from Data Center to Cloud. Unfortunately we didn't learn about this "limitation" until about 3 months before our planned go-live date.

If you use Jira automation rules much at all, this is a major gap (as of March 2025) with migrating to Jira Cloud from Server or Data Center. Our migration vendor didn't have a way to mitigate this, nor did Atlassian provide anything to help (e.g. JCMA functionality). And that's sad since it's just JSON data and IDs with known types in their rule contexts. Mapping IDs by name from one instance to another is not rocket science.

There are still a handful of things in automation rules that couldn't be fixed even with the postulated additional JCMA functionality. However, an automated process could highlight the remaining suspects for manual review -- a huge improvement.

I'm creating some custom scripts to rewrite our exported rule JSON before importing to Cloud, and I expect to mitigate 95% of these gaps. Unfortunately it's nothing I can share due to business IP limitations. As a Jira admin and a former software developer, this challenge happened to be in my wheelhouse.

Charlie Misonne
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
March 10, 2025

Hi @Mykenna Cepek 

I agree, if you have a lot of auatomation rules validating/ replacing the IDs is challenging.

I hope your script turns out well!

Mykenna Cepek
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
March 26, 2025

We're about to perform our production migration from Data Center to Cloud this weekend. My scripts are working well! A few metrics (yes, I'm bragging here):

  • 44 projects using automation
  • 209 enabled automation rules (we are not migrating disabled rules)
  • Rule export from Data Center was 62,891 lines of (prettied) JSON
  • 8 rules needed 21 fixes to help avoid import errors due to semantic differences
  • EVERY rule needed IDs updated, over 1,500 fine-grained ID edits total.

For example, 479 instances of User IDs needed to be mapped -- an average of more than 2 fixes per rule for just User IDs alone. My scripts also handled IDs for projects, status, fields, issueTypes, issueLinkTypes, priorities, resolutions, and boards.

I've had a full successful import of all rules, but still won't hit 100% due to known gaps like embedded URLs, secrets and other authentication data which is dropped from exports, and a few more dark corners.

0 votes
Charlie Misonne
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
March 20, 2024

Hi @DenJr 

You can export all rules from Cloud as a single JSON file and import that JSON in your DC instance. This will import all rules as disabled and you can enable them 1 by 1.

While the import is certainly helpful it does not take care of everything. IDs can be different on both environments. e.g. an automation rules creates an issue of type Task with ID 5. If issue type with ID 5 is a bug on your DC instance it will create a bug instead.
So be careful, you need to validate your rules where it uses IDs.

The export is a JSON so you could also prepare/ script the changes in the JSON file before importing.

Also make sure the "rule actor" of the automation rules have the necessary permissions on DC.

Mykenna Cepek
Rising Star
Rising Star
Rising Stars are recognized for providing high-quality answers to other users. Rising Stars receive a certificate of achievement and are on the path to becoming Community Leaders.
March 26, 2025

To avoid misleading folks, let's be clear: essentially EVERY single ID will change when importing Jira automation rules to Jira Cloud from Jira Data Center or Jira Server. In my experience, every single rule needs anywhere from a few to dozens of fixes.

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer
DEPLOYMENT TYPE
SERVER
TAGS
AUG Leaders

Atlassian Community Events