Jira plugins usage statistics

[shrikant vashishtha]

We are a big enterprise using JIRA since many years already for thousands of projects. During this journey we added a lot of plugins. JIRA instance is bloated and we are trying to find a way to see the plugin usage statistics so that we could remove unused plugins.

Is there any way to achieve the same out of the box or by any other means?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No.  Because each plugin could be doing something different.

For example, an add-on could

• Add a custom field type - you'll want to report on how many issues have a value stored in that type of field (possibly many fields)
• Add a report - you need to ask your users who is using the report
• Add a workflow post-function - you need to read all your workflows to see which ones have used it

And so-on.  There's no way to do "usage" because it's too different.  You'll need to go over each add-on, have a look at how it does things and what it adds or changes, and work out a way to establish how your users may be using it.

There are some tricks - for example, fo workflow functions, you can search the raw xml for the names of classes the add-on provides, and you can go over all your non-standard fields with <field x is empty> queries.

[Fedor Sorokin]

In 2018-th have any plugins for decide this issue?

Plugin for manage plugins )

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, because of the reason above.  Anything that could do that analysis in full would have to understand what several thousand different plugins do.

[Fedor Sorokin]

Why? It's function enabled on confluence by plugin Macro usage

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

No, it's not.  Macro usage shows you where macros have been used in Confluence. 

This conversation is about where plugins/add-ons/apps are used.  Not macros. 

Macros can be provided by apps, but even when they are, macro usage is only one of the possible ways an app could be being used in Confluence.  And if people don't use the macros, they still could be using the app in other ways.

[Fedor Sorokin]

Thank you for the answer.

I don't understand why we don't have any way to decide this issue. In situation with my company I don't understand how many people use which plugins. I am new admin of that service and I want to know really statistic of usage.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's because you cannot know what any given plugin might do, and "user is using plugin X because we know they are doing Y" could easily be totally different from "user is using plugin X because we know they are doing Z".  The way to work out who is using a plugin that just provides a report is totally different to the methods you would need to work out who uses a plugin that just provides a workflow function.

Have another read of the original answer, then have a look at your own plugins, then think about how you would want to measure usage for each one.  You'll find you come up with totally different ways to measure it, and I'm pretty sure you will run into more than one plugin with it's own unique way(s) to answer the question.

[Fedor Sorokin]

I understand that. My current issue about migration server version of Jira to Cloud. And I read docs about plugins in Jira is different. And have no idea how to renew version on Cloud platform without any issue.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That probably changes it again.  The plugin usage is probably going to be less use than you think because a lot of the functions in plugins in Server simply don't exist in Cloud.  The plugins and even the plugin frameworks are totally different (barring the small handful Atlassian support in Cloud - Tempo for example).

You'll still need to go over your list of installed plugins and work out how to ask the question about usage.  Then work out how to translate it over to Cloud (if possible) or drop the function.