Identifying app usage in Jira and Confluence

[Heather Koczur]

Hi,

Myself and another Jira/Confluence admin, are trying to understand usage of the apps (formerly known as plugins). We are interested in:

* What apps are actively used?

* What is the level of use, i.e.hourly, daily, monthly?

* Who is using the app(s)?

Thank you!

Heather

[Zack Howard]

Just ran into this issue, and I know this is an old post but I found the answer:

1. Click the settings gear on the top right.
2. Scroll all the way down on the left navigation panel.
3. You should see a setting called "Macro Usage".

The URL looks something like this: https://YOURCOMPANY.atlassian.net/wiki/admin/pluginusage.action

[Zack Howard]

I should clarify, this won't give all of the information you are looking for, but it shows what pages the apps are being used on, and maybe from there you can look at the page analytics as a work-around. 

[Paul A Wright]

That's brilliant.  The MI here is so useful - thank you for sharing.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Every app provides a different function, so you would need to work out a way to identify and track every single app in a different way.

Confluence has the macro usage report, so if a plugin is providing a macro in there, you can at least see what pages these have been used on.

Beyond that, there's no way to do it.  I know of an app for Jira that provides a handful of project reports, a couple of gadgets, some workflow functions and a field type.  That's four totally different things you'd have to analyse in four different ways to find out where they have been used, and that's even before you get on to how they've actually been actively used.

Your best option is to start by asking your user base.  Then have a look through apps that they don't report as high usage to identify how they might be being used and see if you can track down the usage manually.  Then, announce to your users that you are going to turn off an app next week, and see who yells, before and after turning it off.

[Paul Wright]

Go to > Manage apps. Select System from the dropdown then search for App's Usage Stats.

If you use 'cntl F' to find the add on, you can see the number of pages.

Clicking the URL will then return all of the pages where content is associated with the add on and looking at the dates you can get a sense of usage.

Hope that helps.

[Justin Krynicki]

Hi, Paul. Can you elaborate where you navigated to get to App Usage Stats? I don't see any 'System' option to navigate to when on the Manage Apps page in Jira or Confluence.

[Paul A Wright]

Hi @Justin Krynicki 

Of course, more than happy to assist if I can.

If you go to the settings 'cog' at the top right of Jira or Jira Service Desk, and from there select "Manage Apps".

When the list of apps is presented, make sure you're in the 'Manage Apps' section and not the 'Find new Apps' section.

Along the top you have a 'filter visible apps' option, to the right of which you have a drop down box (as per the image below);

If you know the name of the app, (e.g. Draw.io) you can find additional information on this (example again below);

Rather annoyingly, this changed since I wrote the initial response above.

We upgraded to DC version and also migrated our instances, so it looks like the above method is no longer working as expected.

It may, if nothing else, give you a conduit into a better solution.

Do you have a support partner you can escalate to, as they would be more cognisant of the changes and methods to get this data?

It does look like you can just select the app and get stats once selected from the left hand pane. 

Sorry I can't help much further. 

[Martin Zeller]

Hi All,

one can always use this to at least see on which pages the macro / app / add-on is used.

```

macroName:exclude-excerpt*

```

Info can be found here topic "Searching for macros" https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-search-syntax-158720.html