Before You Begin

1. Read Atlassian’s migration guidelines

   We strongly recommend that you refer to the migration guidelines provided by Atlassian before you start on any migration project. These guidelines are a great tool to help you with your overall planning and implementation of the migration. We also recommend that you read the entirety of this guide BEFORE you take any actions with your Jira Cloud setup.

2. Consider whether it would be better to start fresh

   One important thing to note is that migration of 3rd party apps' data (like Tempo) is not natively supported by Atlassian at this time. As a result, it currently requires a significant number of manual steps to complete the migration. Before you start, you should evaluate the pros and cons of migrating Tempo data between your instances – and consider whether it would be better to start with a fresh setup.

3. Understand the feature parity between Server/Data Center and Cloud

   It is also important to be aware of the feature parity between the hosting environments. Some of your customizations may not work anymore, or you need to implement another solution to achieve the same that you have done in your Jira Server environment. In particular, the integration to your external financial system will likely need to be rewritten and redesigned as the API endpoints behave differently between the hosting environments.

4. Consider working with a partner

   Another important caveat is that it is difficult to guarantee data integrity or completeness when migrating your Tempo data from a Jira Server or Data Center instance to a Jira Cloud instance. We strongly advise that you work with one of our recommended partners who has been specifically trained for this purpose.

5. Evaluate whether you should take part in Atlassian’s App Migrations EAP

   Atlassian is offering its customers the option to participate in an early access program for App Migrations, the latest addition to its Jira Cloud Migration Assistant. This will allow you to streamline the migration of Tempo data, including custom fields, accounts, teams, and more. You can sign up for the beta version of the App Migration Assistant EAP here.

About this Guide

The guidelines presented here assume that you are migrating from a Jira Server or Data Center instance with a data restore into your Jira Cloud instance and that you have managed to map the Jira Server or Data Center user directory to match the Atlassian Account IDs used in Jira Cloud. The Jira data export should include a set of the Tempo worklogs but without any associated data (worklog attributes).

Things to Keep in Mind

• Migration can only be completed by Jira administrators and requires knowledge of REST APIs.

• When migrating your Jira instance from Server/Data Center to Cloud, Tempo worklog data will be included in the Jira XML backup and the Jira Cloud Migration Assistant tool. However, this will not have any additional Tempo data (such as billed hours and worklog attribute data) associated with it.

• If you decide to migrate your timesheet approvals, you will need to export the timesheet approval status from the REST API and recreate them in the destination instance. We recommend migrating only the latest timesheet approval data. This is because the timesheet approval history and its timestamp will not match to the source instance once it is migrated.

• Once your migration testing is complete, you should confirm if Tempo was previously installed (with an evaluation or a commercial license) on your Jira Cloud instance. If so, this could lead to problems migrating and using Tempo.

Still have questions? Watch this short video to get an overview of how to plan and prepare for migration: