/status returns Maintenance instead of Running when nodes are not in Maintenance mode and the Database is configured with an unsupported collation

Summary

/status request to JIRA Data Center returns "MAINTENANCE" instead of "RUNNING" when the node is actually Running and not in Maintenance mode.

 This affects JIRA Server as well.

Note

Note that this bug is known to usually occur when the Database is configured with an unsupported collation

Environment

• JIRA 7.4.x (Server, Data Center)

Steps to Reproduce

1. Startup a JDC node running JIRA 7.4.x
2. Log in the node and ensure the node is running well (to avoid JRASERVER-59503)
3. Access the URL <node-address>/status

Expected Results

This will return the following JSON object

{"state":"RUNNING"}

Actual Results

This returns

{"state":"MAINTENANCE"}

and stays that way forever.

 Manually performing a re-index doesn't help. Once the re-index completes, the state is still Maintenance.

Workaround and notes

Please check Jira does not contain any startup warnings. This can be done by accessing
<Jira BASE URL>/secure/errors.jsp

Quite common case the issue occurs when Jira's database is using an unsupported collation. See an example below.

If that is the case, you can follow the instructions to fix that on your instance https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/health-check-database-collation-790955315.html

If you decide to utilize MySQL's utf8mb4_bin collation in Jira versions 7.6 or 7.13 the following automation script can be used to acknowledge the database collation warning:

function clear_maintenance_mode_for_db_collation {
    maint_check=$( curl -s localhost:7101/status | grep -c "MAINTENANCE" | cat )
    if [  "${maint_check}" -gt 0 ]; then
        collation_check=$( curl -s http://localhost:7101/secure/errors.jsp | grep -c "unsupported collation: utf8mb4_bin" | cat )
        if [  "${collation_check}" -gt 0 ]; then
            curl -u "${JIRA_CREDS}" http://localhost:7101/secure/johnson/events/dismiss
            curl -u "${JIRA_CREDS}" http://localhost:7101/secure/johnson/warnings/acknowledge
            sleep 5s
        fi
    fi    
}

Please note we strongly advise an upgrade to Jira 8 or above which supports this natively