How many people does it take to support Datacenter?

[Steve M]

We are in the process of purchasing the Jira, Service Desk, BitBucket and Confluence products.   Our company is between 500 and 600 people and initially the development teams will be the primary users.   We are very downtime sensitive and also very focused on keeping security patching up to date which is why we are choosing Datacenter.   I foresee that as more people see the benefits of workload mgt, tracking, traceability, and reporting that JIRA and Confluence gives, that more of the company will start asking to use the tools.   We plan to stand up a 2 node cluster for each of the primary products: Jira, BitBucket, and Confluence. 

We are trying to figure out how to staff the team that will evangelize, shepherd, train, administer, and maintain the products. 

So in your experience how many people does it normally take to support the tools?  Is it like a SysAdmin person for the hardware and patching, and a JiraAdmin person for shepherding, training, and initial project/spaces setup?   We don't plan on doing any custom development or scripting in the tools initially. 

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

[Joe Pitt · Accepted solution]

Basically yes, a SA and the JIRA Admin can handle it. In my experience we had a group that supported the servers from a hardware and OS level.  They performed any hardware needs, OS patching, and performed server backups. As the JIRA admin I performed the JIRA install and configuration. Once I got things setup there was minimal work to do, mostly updating select lists and creating projects. It was an additional duty for me and only took about 5 hours a week after we got rolling. 

Warning about JIRA permissions:

JIRA works by GRANTING access. You can't restrict access. By default it grants access to the group used to logon (used to be jira-users but may be different on your version).  This can lead to problems. 

 The FIRST thing you need to do to get control is to remove any groups with logon privileges from the permission scheme unless you absolutely want everyone to have that permission.  Then I suggest you setup user roles for the various functions like, tester, QA, Browse Only, etc. Then you can create one permission scheme to cover almost all projects. The project admin controls which users are put in the roles.  This is easy when you first start but may be a big effort later on when you have lots of projects. Using this model it easy to control access.

Also, don't delete issues. The forum is full of people desperately trying to get back deleted issues. You can't.  I use a resolution of 'Deleted'.