Creating A Jira Administrator That Does Not Count Towards License
Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.
Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.
*Except Fisheye and Crucible
Summary
In some use cases, and organization may not have room in their allotted licenses for a dedicated admin user. This guide will show you have a user that cannot work on or view any tickets, but have access to all of the administration menus.
Solution
This solution is only for JIRA versions 7.x, this will not work in JIRA 6.x and below due to a different handling of what users count towards your license.
Create a new user account in your internal directory, ensuring that it does not share a name with any LDAP users.
Create a new group for that user, such as
local-adminsand ensure that that is the only group they are a member of.From ⚙ > System > Global Permissions, grant the group from the previous step the JIRA System Administrators and JIRA Administrators permission.
Log in as that user to test that they have full admin permissions, and that your license count has not increased.
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