The most trusted app for data migration and configuration management in Jira
If you’re responsible for keeping your Jira instance healthy, you’re taking on one of the most essential — and often most complex — roles in the organization. From handling change requests and optimizing your setup to managing the everyday upkeep that keeps things running smoothly, your work is the engine behind a reliable, high-performing Jira environment.
And it’s not just about keeping things up and running. It’s about doing it with minimal disruption to teams and in a scalable way as your organization grows.
What CMJ does
To support this kind of stability at scale, you need the right tools — and that’s where Configuration Manager for Jira (CMJ) comes in. Designed for large-scale configuration management, CMJ helps admins handle everything from promoting changes between environments to managing instance migrations, performing cleanups, and auditing configurations — all with total control and transparency to put admins at ease.
It keeps your Jira environment stable and secure by reducing risk, minimizing disruption, and giving you full visibility into every change.
With CMJ, you can:
- Test and promote configuration changes safely
- Understand the impact of every change before it goes live
- Keep environments consistent across teams and projects
- Reduce manual errors and streamline administrative work
How CMJ works
Behind the scenes, CMJ powers change management through a snapshot-based approach. In Jira Data Center, snapshots act as a "black box" of configuration data — capturing projects, issues, and settings that can be deployed to another instance or used to restore a previous state. Snapshots can be created at the full system or project level, with or without issue data.
On Jira Cloud, CMJ uses a project-based deployment architecture that enables modular, targeted changes between instances.
For deeper insight within a single instance, CMJ on Data Center also includes tools like Integrity Check and Power Admin. These help teams analyze and compare configuration elements, understand dependencies, and detect potential issues — so admins can resolve problems before making changes.
Together, these tools give admins the clarity and control needed to make safe, informed decisions across environments or within a single Jira instance.
Use cases
Promote configuration changes with confidence
Admins routinely receive requests for changes to the Jira setup. To handle those changes safely, CMJ lets you test, validate, and deploy them from your test system to production.
Whether you’re updating workflows, screens, or full project schemes, CMJ captures every change with accuracy and gives you full control before anything goes live. It’s a streamlined way to move from sandbox to production, with fewer surprises and more control.
Here is how it all works:
To learn more, visit our documentation: Data Center: Test - Staging - Production use case or Cloud: Deploy configuration changes from Cloud to Cloud.
Sync configurations across instances
Want to perform tests without compromising the integrity of your production system? CMJ allows you to easily transfer project configurations from one Jira instance to another. So, whether you are setting up a sandbox instance or creating a clone, CMJ is a great choice! Visit our documentation for this use case: Data Center: Creating clones.
Migrate and merge Jira environments
Consolidating environments or planning a move to Cloud? Configuration Manager for Jira (CMJ) offers clarity and control over your data — with zero surprises. CMJ simplifies complex operations like merging multiple Jira Data Center instances, splitting large environments, or migrating to Cloud.
Migration options with CMJ
- Migrate from Data Center to Cloud
- CMJ supports structured, low-risk migrations from Jira Data Center to Cloud — with full visibility and data integrity at every step. View the documentation here: Migrate projects and issues from Jira Server/DC to Jira Cloud
- Merge or split Jira instances
- Need to combine multiple Jira environments or break up a large one? CMJ handles both. View the documentation here: Merge Jira Servers
One customer used CMJ to successfully migrate 200,000 Jira tickets and 2,200 users — with no data loss and complete transparency.
Ensure configuration integrity
CMJ includes integrity checking features in both Cloud and Data Center, designed to catch broken configuration objects, references, and other inconsistencies before deployment.
- In Cloud, CMJ performs an integrity check during the analysis process — comparing source and destination configurations and flagging any issues before changes are applied. Learn more here: Analyze changes
- In Data Center, admins can run the app’s integrity check function to run targeted scans across the system, individual projects, or even CMJ snapshots — offering more control and deeper visibility. The app also provides suggested fixes and navigation to resolve warnings easily. Learn more here: Integrity Check
DC only: Optimize your instance pre-migration
CMJ lets you optimize your instance before migrations. Run Integrity Check before migration to resolve all configuration errors right on the source instance and avoid transferring them to the destination (learn more about Integrity Check). Use Power Admin to clean up unused configurations and old projects and reduce your overall migration scope (learn more about Power Admin).
Even more uses for CMJ
Here are the additional use cases of CMJ that solve the most complex Jira administrator challenges:
Project templating
CMJ makes it easy to replicate success. Share project templates across — and within — Data Center and Cloud applications to save time and ensure consistency. You can transfer all the configurations associated with an exemplar project to another site whenever you need to set up a similar project. Learn more about project templating.
Delegated administration
CMJ offers a smart, scalable way to delegate project configuration — without losing control. Jira admins can give users access to a sandbox environment where they can freely make project changes. Once everything’s set up the way they want it, those changes can be reviewed and promoted to production by an admin. It’s a powerful way to collaborate while maintaining oversight — and it works across both Data Center and Cloud. Learn more about delegated administration.
Backup and restore
When you need to make significant changes, create a backup first. In Data Center, you can generate a full backup that includes configurations and data. In Cloud, CMJ allows you to backup and restore configurations only, but we plan to support issue data soon. Learn more about creating backups.
Top Features
Powerful features that drive smarter change management
Change and impact analysis
With CMJ, you get 100% accurate and detailed change analysis of all desired modifications. You can see how different changes will impact other projects and control whether to go through with them — a core advantage available in both Data Center and Cloud. Learn more CMJ’s analysis.
Audit logs
With the Audit feature in CMJ for Data Center, everything that changes in the system during deployment is recorded. You'll always have complete oversight and transparency into your Jira instance. Learn more about audit logs.
Flexible configuration management
Flexible snapshots
CMJ offers three snapshot types — full system, project configuration, and project with issues — giving admins the flexibility to support a wide range of project import/export use cases. These options make it easy to tailor snapshots based on your specific needs, whether you're migrating a full environment or sharing a single project.
Note: Snapshot creation is available on Data Center only.
More details can be found in our documentation.
Deployment customization
In Data Center, CMJ offers a selective merge feature (known as transformations in the Cloud app), which gives admins control over how configurations are mapped between the source and destination environments.
This allows for fine-tuned deployments — so you can make targeted changes without overwriting the rest of your configuration.
Power Admin
Power Admin is an advanced administration tool that allows you to search for configuration elements, see dependencies and usage, edit, and configure components. It's indispensable for system clean-up or performance tuning.
This tool also enables you to merge custom fields. You can finally eliminate duplicate, legacy, and unnecessary custom fields without losing complete visibility on what will change and how your Jira configuration will look afterward. Learn more about merging custom fields.
This paid app is included free with the purchase of CMJ.
Automation
REST API support
CMJ’s REST API allows admins to automate many of the tasks typically done through the UI. This includes creating, deploying, and managing snapshots — all programmatically.
Check the API reference for supported endpoints and examples.
Health checks and integrity scanning
Integrity Check
Integrity Check detects and prevents corrupted configurations from being deployed on a production server. The app provides "quick fix" buttons to enable you to resolve these issues and proceed with your deployment quickly. Learn more about Integrity Check.
This paid app is included free with the purchase of CMJ.
App integrations
CMJ also supports the migration of 3rd party apps. Check out the documentation below for a list of supported apps on DC and Cloud.
Currently, we offer more extensive support on DC, but we're actively working to expand app support on Cloud.
No matter the size or complexity of your Jira environment, Configuration Manager for Jira gives you the clarity, control, and confidence to make smarter changes — and keep your instance running at its best.
Try CMJ for free