Introducing Confluence Mission Control - The new one-stop shop for product admins!

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community 👋 !

I’m John, a Product Manager on the Confluence Admin Experience team. Today, I’m excited to announce Confluence mission control, a new dedicated workspace for product admins that provides site-level insights and controls for your entire Confluence site – all in one place. Let’s just say your admin experience just got a major facelift. Let’s dive in!

Why Confluence Mission Control?

As product admins, it’s important to have access to insights to assess the overall health of your site and make data-based decisions. If you’ve ever wondered “Who has access to our Confluence site (and should they still have access)?” or “Is our content in Confluence answering our teams' top questions?”…then you’re in the right place. With mission control, you’ll be able to get these insights at your fingertips – helping you save time and more proactively manage your Confluence site.

What’s new?

Navigation to top admin tools

You now have quick access to your top tools – from viewing the audit log, to setting up automation rules, and creating announcement banners. In addition, it’s easier than ever to search for and find specific admin settings, like “Security Configuration” or “Beta Features”.

Alert banners to high priority admin items

We know product admins already have a ton on their plate. That’s why we created alert banners to draw your attention to important site-level notifications and actions, helping you prioritize your daily to-do list.

At-a-glance site insights

Mission control gives product admins a quick snapshot into the overall site health and activity, providing greater oversight and management of Confluence site and spaces. Not only can you see these new insights, but you can take action on them from the call-to-action connected to each card. For example, you can see who’s enabled for external access and make any changes needed via the “manage global permissions” quick link.

Track and manage content activity

Product admins now have visibility to usage and content insights over a specified time period, helping you explore patterns and trends and making data-informed decisions. These insights include the number of active spaces, the number of active content items, the number of spaces with public links enabled, click-through rates of search results, and more.

When will I have access?

Beginning February 2024, Confluence mission control will be available to all Confluence Cloud product admins on Premium and Enterprise plans. To access mission control, click the ⚙️ “Confluence Administration” icon in the upper right corner.

Please note we’re releasing this feature over several weeks, so if you do not see the feature yet, we appreciate your patience! 🙏

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As always, your input is invaluable as we work on improving the Confluence experience for admins. If you have questions or feedback, please leave a comment below!

[Steven Rhodes]

My feedback? "Confluence mission control will be available to all Confluence Cloud product admins on Premium and Enterprise plans." - Yet again Confluence Standard users getting treated like we are on some freemium version and dont deserve any new features.

[Randy O_Neal]

I have to heartily agree with @Steven Rhodes .  We are first and foremost an R&D/software development shop, so our majority spend with Atlassian is in Jira; I've never been able to convince our leadership to spring for Confluence Premium or Enterprise.  Several key aspects of Confluence are unavailable to us for this reason.

I get that you shouldn't expect the world for Confluence Standard, but geez... the gap analysis between Standard v/s Premium/Enterprise is quickly becoming an immeasurable gulf, not just a list of a few extras.

How about showing at least a little love to the Confluence Standard folks too?

[John Hooper]

Thanks @Steven Rhodes and @Randy O_Neal. I understand where you're coming from, and you're totally right that a number of recent releases have been for the Premium and Enterprise only plans.

I do want to call out (which I could've done a better job of in my post), that the updated side nav for Confluence administration is being released to all plans, and we do believe that this will be a material improvement for navigation and discovery of our admins tools and settings pages for all Confluence admins.

As far as the new site-level insights within the feature not being made available to the Standard plan, for this initial release we chose to stay consistent with our existing pricing and packaging model which includes having our analytics features only be available to Premium and Enterprise customers. 

That being said, we'll continue to evaluate what is available per plan as we enhance this feature, as we do sincerely want to improve Confluence for admins at all levels.

[Brendon Langhorne]

I have a question regarding visibility of "Space Activity" - when I "view space analytics" I can only see 25 of our 196 spaces and my colleague who also has admin permissions only sees 65 of the total spaces?

If we add ourselves or the Confluence admin group to a space that's not displayed, it still doesn't show?

What dictates if the space shows up here?

Thanks

[Pierrick Brossin]

Can only relate to what was already said. Features giving (security-related) information about your SaaS instance shouldn't require a premium subscription.

[Aura Hill]

I really like the set up of mission control and having this info overview. One piece of feedback - for Confluence Admins, it shows accounts that have been deleted. Not sure why they are still showing up. And I would love to see stats about my users. I'd like to know my overall count, how many were added recently and a % change would be great. Right now I have to go to billing to find out and compare month by month. 

[Nick Christesson]

@Steven RhodesTo be fair, we do now have an expanding menu tree. We'll save minutes a year in scrolling down.

[Christopher G Andrews]

This page is a great start.  When can we expect the API(s) to pull this info out of Confluence?  Is there a Jira we can watch to track progress on this?  This information needs to be shared with security and management, but there is no way to get this data out of this page.  

[Michael Davis]

Is there any cost for Mission Control?  My screen says try it for free.

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Michael Davis Which tool do you mean?

[John Hooper]

Thanks all for the discussion and feedback!

@Aura Hill - Appreciate you pointing these items out. We're actively working to update the logic to ensure that any admins that are not active will no longer be displayed. As for the user data, as of now we don't plan to add user-centric data to mission control, but there are active discussions happening to around adding more user license / user activity data to Atlassian Administration along the lines of what you're requesting

@Christopher G Andrews - Thank you! We don't currently have any plans with a planned date for adding public APIs that connect to mission control's data. Would you be willing to share more around which data points that you'd like your management and security team to have access to, and / or any specific examples of how they would use the data? 

@Michael Davis - the mission control feature is currently only part of our Premium and Enterprise editions, so you are able to start a free trial to test drive it as well as our other Premium features, but eventually would need to upgrade to either Confluence Premium and Enterprise in order to have ongoing access to it 

[Christopher G Andrews]

We need to get these metrics out of Atlassian Cloud and into our metrics and dashboarding tools.

• Only Confluence admins can see the mission control, so we are not able to allow stakeholders to be able to see this page without making them full admins
• The current Confluence APIs are extremely clunky and limited for getting metrics or data in general
  • There is no way to get configuration info from Confluence APIs currently - like "External access features" or "Beta features"
• Other Cloud services that we use, like Google Workspace, have APIs and even automatically push the data to a storage location. 

If you have a cloud service, it needs APIs.  It is so frustrating that so much of Atlassian administration involves manually clicking on items.  There is no Atlassian Terraform provider.  The permission model is not granular.  Cloud server logs are not available to anyone, regardless of service level.  Security is paywalled behind Premium and Enterprise subscriptions.  

What is the road map for Mission Control in terms of additional panels?  As frustrated as I am with Atlassian on APIS, this Mission Control is a very good step in the right direction for securing our services and I hope if only gets better.

[Paul Burville]

Seems like a bit of extortion going on here! It looks to be a handy feature but perhaps something that really should be default with todays security focus. The ability to be able to monitor access and permissions with logs that are exportable should be a standard feature in its most basic form (even if just an export to xls) paying extra for it seems a bit off $4573.8, Per year) I get having an enhanced dashboard with reporting to make it much easier could be something that is paid for for sure, Any admin of any business should be able export user and admin logs along with permissions of any platform,

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

I like the clean new interface for Mission control.  BUT I find it VERY confusing that Settings contains not just the general configuration settings for Confluence, but for the Apps as well.  So at the top of the list is a bunch of Apps before I can get to Configuration or look and feel.

Could we not split out the App Settings from the native Confluence Settings.

Thanks...Susan

[John Hooper]

@Christopher G Andrews - Appreciate all of the context! Very helpful, and all makes sense. In terms of what's coming next for the mission control feature, the next release of cards / charts will centered around content engagement and content management. Beyond many additional data points, we also plan to explore adding more capabilities to support scalable and personalized usage, so your feedback is very helpful.

@Paul Burville - Thanks Paul, understand where you're coming from. We haven't yet decided whether security / access will be a focus of the mission control feature, but your point stands regardless of whether its within this feature or elsewhere within Confluence / Beacon / etc. I've added your points into notes we're compiling around admin needs for auditing and access

@Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ - Are you referring to when an app creates their own separate section within the side nav?

Also, wanted to share a link to connect with my team and I for anyone interested in chatting live through their feedback: https://calendar.app.google/6QEWDTXbrwtP65xb8

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi John,

My settings look like this:

I would rather not have the Apps' Settings intermixed with the Confluence Settings.  Or if they must be at least have the Confluence Settings ordered ahead of the Apps' Settings.  This is very confusing as you can imagine.

Susan

[John Hooper]

Thank you @Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ , appreciate you including the image. Totally makes sense. We'll explore how and when we can make an improvement here

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

Those without the Premium or Enterprise Plans will be able to use the Better Content Archiving app's reports to get a large collection of reports and charts about their site and also about a single space!

I suggest you install the app now because it will start collecting the page views, page updates, etc. and other time-dependent data from the moment of the installation. Then, by the time, we release all the dashboards, you will already have a bunch of invaluable data points!

This is how the "Space performance" dashboard will look like: (again, available for the Standard and even for the Free plan!)

(Please note that I'm part of the team developing Better Content Archiving.)

[Steven Rhodes]

@Levente Szabo _Midori_ How about releasing a "light" version of Better Content Archiving with this dashboard?

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

@Steven Rhodes What exactly do you mean by the "light" version of the app?

[Rita Nygren]

Still a victim of bait n switch - "standard" = no development.  Most of the features the folks who purchased this tool thought they'd be getting aren't actually available to those of us who administer it because of the snd/premium line.

[Patrice Champet]

Hello,

I have some diffilcuties to understand the numbers that are on this mission control screen, for the total number of elements

I have a lot of elements on this one, and, as Confluence admin, using Analytics, i don't find the same number of pages/blogs.
Even looking at created per month, we have something like 3 to 4 X the number we have in Analytics.

Could you please explain how the numbers are calculated and what is included ?
(drafts, page version, attachments ,.... )

Thanks a lot !

[P_D_ Foerster]

I read the news a while ago but came here again because of a support request which directed me to this post. I did a DC to Cloud test migration and wondered why out of my 346 spaces only 343 were counted as total. Since this is a customer instance I don't know every space and their status but this number confused me because it says total number of spaces. That's why I had to create a support request to let Atlassian check.

In my opinion the total number of spaces heading / metric is totally misleading because you say that it counts only the number of active spaces.

So to improve this either

• change the heading from total spaces to active spaces
  or even better
• state number of active, archived, trashed spaces and then of course the total number of spaces.

Only then this makes sense for a Confluence admin and is useful. Otherwise we would have to switch to other menus, e.g Space directory > filter Archived or go to admin menu trashed spaces and then count them manually or use the API? to get the results.

[David Broadhurst]

Great to see new security features but feels like you are just adding features that Confluence should already have regardless of the subscription level.