Health Checks

Health Checks are a great way to identify problems in Jira and save the time of your Jira Administrators. Optimizer for Jira comes with over 20 health checks which can be used to analyze your Jira instance and show warnings or errors when something is detected that is considered bad practice or incorrect.

To get started using the Health Checks in Optimizer, please use the table of contents below to navigate to the section you want to learn more about:

Accessing Health Checks

The Health Checks are displayed on Optimizer’s Homepage, it is the first thing you’ll see when you enter the app. As a reminder, you can access Optimizer by clicking the ⚙️ Settings icon in the top right of the screen and then on Optimizer.

How Health Checks are scored

On the homepage, you’ll see an overview of the health check scores with a grade and a message about the state of your Jira instance.

The grade is calculated from the number of Health Checks that have failed or have warnings and provides a good indicator of the health of your Jira instance.

Health Check Collections

For your convenience, Optimizer’s Health Checks are grouped into Collections. Each collection comprises several related Health Checks that focus on different areas.

There are collections for:

Each collection is displayed as a card containing a summary of how many health checks within the collection passed, had warnings, failed, or were disabled. This lets you quickly focus on the Health Check results that most need improvement.

Clicking on a collection card will take you to an overview of the health checks within that collection, allowing you to see at a glance the state of each health check, when it last ran, and how many results there are.

Running Health Checks

By default, Optimizer’s health checks run automatically once per day but it is also possible to manually run health checks to get more up to date information. For instance, if you take action based on the results of a health check, then a manual re-run will allow you to quickly see any improvements reflected in your score, and corresponding updated results.

Health checks can be run either individually or by collection.

To run an individual health check, click on the card for the collection the health check belongs to and then click on the ▶️ run icon in the row for that health check.

To run a collection of health checks, you can click on the ▶️ run icon in the top right of a collection’s card on the homepage.

Viewing Health Check Results

In order to view the results of a health check, click on the collection card (e.g., Custom Fields) as shown below.

Once you have clicked into the collection, you will be able to see all the different checks that Optimizer has run on your Jira instance. In the example below, you can see that the Custom Field collection has run two checks;

• Global custom fields

• Unused custom fields

Within each collection, you can click onto any of the rows to find out more detail about the results. This will open a window that displays the description of each Health Check along with a summary of the results, as shown below.

You can click the row to deep dive even further. In this example, we are going to click on the “8 unused Custom Fields found”, and it will take us to a smart table where these fields are displayed.

Once you have reached the smart table, it operates like the other smart tables in Optimizer. You can easily configure and delete individual or multiple custom fields within this one place, and it makes the maintenance process really easy for Jira admins.

Configuring Health Checks

All of Optimizer’s health checks have settings that you can change to configure them to your preference. The settings can be updated by selecting the ⚙️ Settings button at the top of the left navigation bar, or in the top right of the homepage. Health check settings exist under the Health Checks tab. You can change the setting parameters as desired and then Save the changes.

A screenshot of Optimizer’s homepage. The side navigation bar should be visible including the settings button near the top. The health checks chart and cards should be visible with the settings button on the right hand side of the page. The 2 health check buttons should be highlighted.

All of the health checks have 2 common settings - enabled and schedule (described below). Some health checks also have specific settings (for example, the maximum number of issues for a project to be considered small).

Enabling/Disabling Health Checks

Each health check has a setting allowing it to be to be enabled or disabled. There are 3 possible states for this setting:

• Enabled - the health check will run automatically according to the schedule and when run manually

• Manual Only - the health check will not run automatically, only when manually triggered

• Disabled - the health check will not run automatically and cannot be manually triggered

This setting will appear next to the health check name in the settings modal (which can be accessed by clicking on one of the ⚙️ Settings buttons in Optimizer) and the value can be changed by selecting the desired state and clicking Save.

A screenshot of the settings modal (which opens after clicking one of the settings buttons) on the health checks tab, highlighting the enabled setting of one of the health checks

Scheduling Health Checks

Each health check has a setting that determines when the health check will run automatically (if enabled). The setting allows the selection of a frequency (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly) and a time (for instance, hour of the day) which determines when and how often the health check will run.

This setting will appear within the expandable section for the health check in the settings modal (which can be accessed by clicking on one of the ⚙️ Settings buttons in Optimizer) and the value can be changed by selecting the desired frequency and time and clicking Save.

A screenshot of the settings modal (which opens after clicking one of the settings buttons) on the health checks tab with one of the health check settings sections open, highlighting the schedule setting