How many Atlassian administrators are needed?

[Matt Rice]

There have been various questions about how many administrators are need for an environment. Want to give some specifics about our environment and ask again. The team I am on is responsible for Data Center: Jira Software, Confluence, and Bitbucket. Also responsible to build and maintain the infrastructure they run on.

I would consider all the instances to be large do to the integrations, number of users, projects & number of issues in Jira, spaces & pages in Confluence, and projects, repos, and code in Bitbucket. Started using these products ~7 years ago and usage & adoption continues to grow. 

How many full and part time administrators do feel should be allocated for support? Please share the specifics about your organization and how many administrators you have allocated. 

1 full time administrator and 2 part time

• Confluence DataCenter:
  • 5 node clusters in 3 Data Centers. Only 1 active.
  • 3 non-prod environments for testing 
  • 62 user installed apps
  • 5798 active users
  • 379 active spaces
  • 2377056 pages
• Jira DataCenter
  • 6 node clusters in 3 Data Centers. Only 1 active
  • 3 non-prod environments for testing 
  • 25 user installed apps
  • 3044 active users
  • 209 active projects
  • 2210244 issues
  • Major integrations : ServiceNow, Metabase, and Miro
• Bitbucket Datacenter
  • 4 node clusters in 3 Data Centers. Only 1 active
  • 3 non-prod environments for testing 
  • 19 user installed apps
  • 1736 active users
  • 194 active projects / plus personal projects
  • 12150 repositories
  • Major integration: Jenkins

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

Hi, @Matt Rice.  Great topic.  But, IMHO you need to shed a little more light to get "good" answers.

• How many users?
• How many integrations - and can you characterize them in terms of complexity, from the Atlassian Marketplace or in-house developed, etc.
• How many many Confluence Spaces & Pages?
• How many Jira Projects in-flight?
  • How many workflows?
• How many repos?
• How self-sufficient are users/teams expected to be?

The better the picture you paint, the more likely it is others will be able to relate to it and share their insights.  :)

Best,

-dave

[Matt Rice]

I edited my original question @Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_ 

[Dave Liao]

@Matt Rice - Yowza, +50 apps in your Confluence instance? Nice.

You wrote “5 node clusters in 3 Data Centers. Only 1 active.” - can you elaborate or rephrase this? I’m not understanding what this bullet means.

[Craig Nodwell]

Agree with @Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_ as well as some other things
Standards
Governance
SCM controls
What else is the team responsible for ? ex: DevOps... Build/Release Management
How complicated are the projects / workflows based on the integrations you've listed above.
How much control are users given to manage their own processes?
How much is shared across the tools.

[Mike Rathwell]

This is a great topic, @Matt Rice . I can give a baseline that is a fundamental beyond the salient points raised by @Craig Nodwell and @Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_ ...

UNLESS the environment is dead simple and is NOT likely a blocking factor to work being done, two. Having been a SPOF in a busy and complex environment, it really sucked going on vacation as I had to put a moratorium on changes well in advance of planned absence and I knew that the "urgent" needs would just have to wait. 

After that... experience and creativeness of the admins extant comes into play. At one of my last spots, our TPM claimed I was better and faster than all the admins together at his previous shop. Perhaps he was being nice but I know I was able to turn some stuff quicker than anyone expected.

So... Start with two minimum and then see how bad/fast the backlog grows

[Tom Lister]

For the basic everyday tasks like adding users to groups/projects etc we managed to get general IT support to pick those up to let us admins focus on the more difficult stuff. They had to have admin rights but fortunately they are easy to work with and stay in their lanes.

[Dave Liao]

It depends. 😅

I started a discussion about this back in July 2021 ("how many Jira admins does it take to screw in a lightbulb"), which got 9 comments:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Enterprise-discussions/How-many-Jira-admins-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb/m-p/1740677

[Tom Lister]

Only one but you need to buy the light bulb app

[Dave Liao]

Hopefully there's a Data Center version!

[Mike Rathwell]

AND that the Cloud version isn't missing critical features.

[Dave Liao]

Researched, and apparently Lightbulb for Jira Cloud is nested under the global Apps menu instead of having a native panel in the issue view... c'mon Atlassian!

[Summer Hogan]

Great discussion @Matt Rice and @Dave Liao 

We have one JIRA admin for our whole IT department. I have to imagine he is a bit overwhelmed. 

A follow up question: Should being a JIRA admin be a full time job or should it be part of someone's job? I've seen it both ways.

[Karen Rogalski]

depends on a number of factors, though the list isn't inclusive of all factors:

1) How many users?

2) Are projects using different Screen, Workflow, Issue Type Schemes, etc.

3) How many Custom fields?

4) How many Addons?

The more complex a Jira instance, the more Jira Admin support is needed.

[Dave Mathijs]

When scanning client environments, I never encountered less than five.

Two is a minimum, maximum five I would say.

[Laurie Sciutti]

Great topic, @Matt Rice ! 

It's interesting to see that I'm not the only one who is the sole admin.  I wear many hats (Jira admin, Confluence admin, Crowd admin as well as other ancillary products managing almost ALL aspects of system administration for nearly 3000 users at it's peak -- configs, development, testing, documentation, governance, user training, hardening, upgrades/patches, research and implementation of new add-ons and processes, etc.) and feel that I can be MUCH more effective if I had a team of admins. 

Until recently, we had another sys admin who was awesome and helped alleviate some of the load but I've found that the majority of my time is spent educating users (we are a very white-glove service-first oriented company) on best practices and usage of the applications, despite having a wealth of documentation and how-to videos available.  While this is great and is common for SMEs, it also doesn't afford much time to focus on improving processes.  Even with the automation and off-loading of certain BAU activities, it's still A. LOT.

For those of you out there who also have limited team resources, how the heck do you not get burned out (or are you and just continuing on)?  It's exhausting!