There’s an old saying, “what gets measured gets managed.” And when managing mission-critical work — customer support tickets, product-related tasks during a sprint, or some other important activities – it’s imperative to constantly measure the performance of the systems that enable that work.

Monitoring the health of your Atlassian applications can help uncover issues such as how an app update or plugin can impact a machine’s performance or how memory and bandwidth limitations are exacerbated during peak production periods. It can also give your team a heads up about licenses about to expire and even how active users are.

But you don’t need to spend tons of money on new monitoring tools or waste hours configuring them when you can monitor Atlassian application performance with open source tools — for free!

Tools you’ll need

• Atlassian tools (works with Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket y Bamboo).

• Grafana an open-source platform for data visualization, monitoring and analysis.

• Prometheus  is a monitoring platform that collects metrics from monitored targets by scraping metrics HTTP endpoints on these targets.

Step-by-step tool configuration

Jira Configuration

Note: On the same server we have  installed Jira Software 7.13.3, Graphana 6.2.2 and Prometheus 2.10.0.

After you have successfully installed Jira, Download Prometheus Exporter for Jira from Atlassian Marketplace. This exposes the following metrics:

• JVM

• Issue statistics

• Login/logout statistics

• Dashboard views

• User Sessions

• Attachment disk space

• Issues count

• Current number of users

• Maximum number of users

• Number of days before maintenance expire

• Database metrics

You can access the metric here: http://localhost:8080/plugins/servlet/prometheus/metrics

Prometheus Configuration

Download the latest release of Prometheus for your platform, then extract it:

tar -xvfz prometheus-*.tar.gz

cd prometheus-*

Prometheus configuration is YAML. The Prometheus download comes with a sample configuration in a file called prometheus.yml

Then you should add the reference to the metric collection servlet to the prometheus.yml. For example, for Jira it would look like this:

- job_name: 'jira'
 scheme: https # change to http if don't you have https
 metrics_path: '/plugins/servlet/prometheus/metrics'
 static_configs:
 - targets: ['localhost:8080'] # Jira host and port you serve

The Prometheus server is a single binary called prometheus:

./prometheus

Installation and setup is finished. You can collect metrics. Prometheus will be available at http://localhost:9090

Grafana Configuration

We will use Grafana to visualize metrics stored in Prometheus. There are a couple of example dashboards in the official site.

Download the latest release of Grafana for your platform, then extract it:

tar -xvfz grafana-*.tar.gz
cd grafana-*/bin./grafana-server

Grafana interface will be available at http://localhost:3000 (username: admin / password: admin)

After login, the fist step is to add a new Data-Source in Grafana. This will connect to Prometheus to gather the metrics data.

Then, you can add a new Dashboard that will get the data from the previous created Data-Source.

You can find a dashboard for Jira here.

After a couple of minutes you will be able to view your metrics on the Dashboard. You can also add new panels to the Dashboard.

You can also build one Dashboard to tack all your Atlassian tools in one single Dashboard.

Eyes wide open (source)

Keeping an eye on application performance is key for maintaining high productivity, healthy workflows, and happy team members (and customers). But it shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg or take forever to configure monitoring tools. Instead, everything you need for immediate insight and actionable intelligence is available with some simple configuration of some free tools.