Managing lienses (for 3rd party apps)

[Simon Teppett]

Looking for a little advice.

We have a dev team that tends to use quite different 3rd party apps etc from the rest of our business (Balsamic, TestRail, Mural, etc)

At the moment our dev team is on a separate Jira instance, but there is pressure to combine into a single instance. Especially for our software helpdesk to combine with other helpdesk functions.

What is the best approach to this without paying for lots of licenses that will never be used?

If we keep the developers on a separate Jira, can tickets be linked across instances?

Thanks in advance

[Ste Wright · Accepted solution]

Hi @Simon Teppett 

You can link issues across 2 instances, as Alex has mentioned - but it's mainly just that. If you want to use the issues in other features, like Boards or Plans, the issues need to be in one instance.

Apps from the Marketplace need to match your user tier, but I would consider...

• Which of these Apps have off-site licensing management - eg. Mural isn't managed through Atlassian's Marketplace, so wouldn't need to match Jira's user tier
• Are there alternative Apps you could use, which would be cheaper, or might be useful to more users?
• What is the sunken cost of not having the issues in one instance - eg. manual reporting, static views of the data in Excel, etc?

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One further alternative would be to use an App to either visualise data from multiple instances, or sync data between the 2 instances more powerfully (so the issues could essentially exist within both)

Check out Apps such as:

• Watchtower - for issues from multiple instances on one board
• Backbone Issue Sync for Jira 
• Issue Sync - Synchronization for Jira 
• Exalate
• ....or another App from the Marketplace

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Another option, if reporting is your main need, is Jira Enterprise. If you have 801+ users, Enterprise might be an option, which allows for up to 150+ instances to exist. App pricing then remain per user tier per instance, so Apps could be kept cost efficient this way.

You could still bring together data from multiple instances though, using Atlassian Analytics.

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Obviously these alternatives also have a cost associated with them - but it depends if that costs is higher or lower than merging the two instances together :)

Ste

[Simon Teppett]

Wow! Thank you so much for taking the trouble to put all of that down. I will go through those options and take a look. Many thanks

[Alex Koxaras _Relational_]

Hi @Simon Teppett

You can link two cloud instances with Application Link (more info here https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Software-questions/Can-you-link-2-Jira-Cloud-Instances/qaq-p/1671876 and here https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/use-applinks-to-link-to-atlassian-products/). If you e.g. migrate one instance to another then you will most likely have a higher user tier for the jira family products. This means that the other apps will increase the tier to the highest jira user tier. If you keep them on a separate instance the bill will stay as is. However there might be a possibility where you have to add a developer or two to your instance, in order to view the project and be able to link issues.

Let me know if the above helps.