How do I know whether a plugin is in use: Confluence

Question

Hello,

I got a task to move a Confluence Server to Cloud. It has  a number of plugins installed, but in that company nobody knows whether these plugins are actually in use.  I already checked the Macro Usage page but doesn't list all the plug ins.

How can I find it out?  Some examples are here:

RB Supplier - Core

RB Support - Core

Viewtracker Supplier Plugin

Tooltips

Viewtracker Supplier Plugin

Thanks,

Rashmi

Sloan N_ B_ · Answer

Hi Rashmi

I am Niklas, Head of Customer Success at bitvoodoo, the vendor of Viewtracker - Analytics for Confluence.

Viewtracker Supplier Plugin

The app Viewtracker Supplier is needed if you use Reporting for Confluence by Service Rocket to built custom reports based on data from Viewtracker. If neither Viewtracker nor Reporting are installed, I can asure you Supplier is not used. Else check on pages where Reporting is used.

Viewtracker - Analytics for Confluence Cloud does not support custom reports at this time and Viewtracker Supplier is not available in Confluence Cloud.

But Viewtracker itself is. You can learn more about moving Viewtracker to Cloud in our Documentation at Migrate Viewtracker - Analytics for Confluence to Cloud

RB Supplier - Core and RB Support - Core

These two apps are part of the Randombits (RB) libraries. To find out if you need them check with the documentation provided by Service Rocket: ServiceRocket Add-on Dependencies

Cheers
Niklas

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

There is no simple way to know if an app is in use, because an app can do all sorts of things and some of their activity might not be even traceable.  Most apps don't have a way to record when they've been used either, so you can be a bit stuck.

Even defining "is used" can be hard - imagine you've got Scriptrunner for Confluence, and you've written something that listens for page changes and does something when a page is changed.  Is Scriptrunner used just because you've created that listener?  Even if the listener only gets triggered in one space?  Which you've deleted, so the script never gets run?

There are some measures of "used" you can do automatically.  Confluence has a lot of macros supplied by apps, and a report that tells you how much and where any macro is on a page.  So you can tell how much an app that provides macros is used.

But for most apps, you're going to need to look at what they do, and work out how to measure if they're used at all.

Another trick is to look at the urls that reporting apps provide (viewtracker gives you urls inside confluence for reports) - if you can enable logging on your server so you can capture when people request those urls, you can run for a couple of weeks and then scan the logs to see how frequently (if at all) they might be used.

Jack Brickey · Answer

There is no black and white answer here. You need to look at each app individually. You need to understand what the app does and see if there is some way of identifying usage. You might reach out to the app support for thoughts. Consider temporarily disabling and see if anyone screams. Consider emailing all Confluence users for input.