Installing Dataplane

Database Configuration

Before installing Arsenale Dataplane, check your JIRA database server against the system requirements and recommendations.

Arsenale Dataplane stores all its data in the same database used by JIRA.

MySQL Database Performance Tuning

MySQL's default installation is not particularly optimized for performing database-intensive reporting operations. In particular, a stock configuration of MySQL can cause performance problems.

Although Arsenale Dataplane will generally work without needing to perform any specific MySQL configuration, some reports can take an exceedingly long time to run if your JIRA installation is large and MySQL has not been properly configured.

1. For best performance, the database user used by JIRA needs to be granted the "CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES" privilege. To grant this privilege, connect to the MySQL console and execute the following statement, and then restart your JIRA instance. (Substitute the same values into this query as you did when performing the original JIRA database setup.) 

   GRANT CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES ON <JIRADB>.* TO '<USERNAME>'@'<JIRA_SERVER_HOSTNAME>';
   FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

2. Before installing Arsenale Dataplane, we strongly recommend that you check your MySQL installation to ensure that JIRA is using the InnoDB database engine.  The InnoDB database is also the only MySQL storage engine officially supported by Atlassian for JIRA.
3. In addition, we recommend that you configure the InnoDB buffer pool to use as much physical memory as you have available on your database server. For JIRA installations with a few tens of thousands of issues, we recommend a minimum of one gigabyte, or more if possible. This cache will benefit JIRA as well as Arsenale Dataplane.
4. We also recommend enabling the MySQL query cache and setting the query cache size to at least 10 megabytes.

An example configuration of /etc/my.cnf with these modified settings looks like this:

[mysqld]

innodb_buffer_pool_size=1024M
query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_size = 10M

Other Databases

No special database tuning is currently required for databases other than MySQL.

Dataplane Installation

Arsenale Dataplane is a standard JIRA add-on, and can be downloaded and installed from within the JIRA Universal Plugin Manager.

Alternatively, you may download the Dataplane .jar file and upload it to your JIRA installation manually via the same admin page.

Once installed, Arsenale Dataplane is accessible from the Dataplane Reports menu in the main JIRA navigation bar.

On JIRA 6.0 and above, if your browser window is not wide enough, the Dataplane Reports menu may get collapsed into the More menu option:

Enabling Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean Character Sets

In most cases, the default settings allow Dataplane to produce correctly-rendered output with Asian languages and you do not need to make any changes. However, Dataplane depends on the Java-standard system fonts and PDF fonts to render Asian characters, so if you are experiencing issues with text in charts or PDF exports, please see below.

Configuring Asian Fonts for Charts and Graphics

Dataplane renders charts on the JIRA server, and Dataplane normally uses the fonts bundled with Java for rendering labels, titles and other text on charts. In many cases, Java will supplement these fonts with system fonts when rendering Asian languages (including Chinese, Japanese and Korean). If the required fonts are missing from the JIRA server, Dataplane may inadvertently render Asian languages as small squares ("◻") instead of the proper characters.

If the text on charts is not rendered correctly, you will need to install the appropriate fonts on the JIRA server. There are two methods for doing so:

Method 1: Installing Missing System Fonts

This section is applicable to Linux servers only, and only for Dataplane 2.1.1 and above. For Windows and Mac OS X servers, please see the following section entitled "Manually Installing Fonts for Dataplane".

By default, most Linux installations support only Western languages. In order for Dataplane to render charts correctly in Asian languages, you must install the appropriate font pack. The instructions for doing so depend on your Linux distribution. In general, for RedHat Enterprise Linux and CentOS systems, the following commands will install the correct fonts. You must have system administrator privileges in order to perform these commands:

After performing the above font installation, you must restart JIRA. (If you do not wish to restart JIRA, or if you do not have system administrator privileges, you can also try installing fonts only for Dataplane by following the instructions in the following section.)

Method 2: Manually Installing Fonts for Dataplane

This section is applicable to Linux, Windows and Mac OS X Servers. You can manually install a compatible TrueType font for the use of Dataplane only. This font must be placed on the JIRA server under the JIRA data directory (not the JIRA home directory). For JIRA Data Center installations, these fonts must be stored in the shared data directory.

Dataplane optionally supports separate fonts for both regular and boldface text. The font file(s) should be stored in the following locations:

The above directory must be created it if does not already exist.

Additionally, your font must be renamed to exactly "chart-regular.ttf" or "chart-bold.ttf". The bold font is optional, and if the bold font is not present, Dataplane will automatically use the regular font instead. The font can be any standard TrueType font that supports your desired locale and which is supported by your OS.

For Japanese text, the IPAex Gothic font is known to work well. In particular, download the file labeled as "IPAexGothic(Sans Serif)(Ver.002.01)" with filename "ipaexg00201.zip", then extract the .TTF file and rename it to chart-regular.ttf according to the directions above.

Please contact us for information about Chinese and Korean fonts.

Note that Dataplane looks for the presence of a chart font whenever it is installed or enabled. After installing a new font file, you must disable and re-enable Dataplane in order for the font change to take effect.

Configuring Asian Fonts for PDF Exports

In addition to the configuration of fonts in charts, Asian language characters might require additional configuration for PDF exports.

Most PDF file readers are bundled with fonts that support Asian character sets. Dataplane automatically looks at the language set in the user's JIRA profile to determine which font to use in the PDF export. If no explicit language is set at the user profile level, Dataplane chooses the JIRA system default language instead.

If the language is one of Chinese, Japanese or Korean, Dataplane will automatically generate a PDF file using a font that supports the relevant character set. Since PDF readers include these fonts as part of the PDF reader, Dataplane does not need to bundle the font with the PDF file, so the size of the PDF will still be small.

If the above algorithm does not work in your scenario (for example, your users have an English-language JIRA profile but they still need to export PDFs containing Japanese characters), it is also possible to manually override the font used for PDF exports.

To manually override the PDF output language, edit your $JIRA_HOME/bin/setenv.sh file and add the following to JVM_SUPPORT_RECOMMENDED_ARGS (or on Windows, customize the JVM parameters in the JIRA Tomcat Service) based on the language you wish to support in your PDF output: