Introduce App Usage for Jira Data Center EAP and Ask for vendor collaboration suggestions

Dear Dev Community,

We are excited to announce the launch of our Early Access Program (EAP) for App usage for Jira Data Center. Our team has been listening closely to feedback from our Data Center customers, and we understand that investing in apps can be a significant undertaking for customer organizations. Jira admins often face challenges in understanding how and where apps are being used in their instance, making it difficult to make informed decisions about app management, renewal, or migration to the Atlassian cloud with installed apps.

With App usage for Jira Data Center, we aim to alleviate these challenges and provide a summary of data about where apps are being used in customers’ Jira Data Center instances.

Knowing that Atlassian won’t be able to cover every specific function and usage of all marketplace apps, our current goal is to include only common app interaction data from our Jira product side, such as custom fields, database tables, JQL searches, API calls, workflows, scheduled tasks and dashboards, etc. to help Jira admins to get started. We encourage admins to use that information and talk to their teams and app vendors to obtain a full picture of app consumption.

While Atlassian works on shipping generic and common App usage data, we encourage App vendors to consider creating app-specific usage data dimensions that are only relevant to your apps. This way, admin users will get a more holistic view of app usage and adoption.

We’d also like to hear from you on how we might collaborate to better help admin users understand your App usage. You can fill in our collaboration suggestion collection form. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Stay tuned with us in this community!

Cheers

Data Center Product Team

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@MikeNi can you elaborate what you mean by this?

we encourage App vendors to consider creating app-specific usage data dimensions that are only relevant to your apps. This way, admin users will get a more holistic view of app usage and adoption.

Are you saying there is a way for apps to publish app usage data? Or are you asking us to build our own functionality (to mimic what Atlassian does)?

Knowing that Atlassian won’t be able to cover every specific function and usage of all marketplace apps, our current goal is to include only common app interaction data from our Jira product side, such as custom fields, database tables, JQL searches, API calls, workflows, scheduled tasks and dashboards, etc

Since you’re only covering common interactions, what happens if an app doesn’t have common interactions? Are you going to show this as no activity? Or you actually going to inform admins that your data could be incorrect?

4 Likes

Out of curiosity -

Learn when an app’s UI has been viewed, by whom, as well as the number of unique users.

How are you planning on doing this since this would require consent from the end user which they can deny. Will you be providing guidance to the admins that the data may be incorrect?

3 Likes

@amardesich, can you please elaborate what the messaging is going to be with regard to this?

Because obviously, the cynical reading of this somewhat alienating project is that Atlassian is trying to either help customers create a case for app discount discussions (your app is only used by X people, why do I need to pay for Y?) or create a case for customers to decommission apps based on usage (perhaps to help them migrate to cloud??).

There are tons of customer demands, so saying that this is because of what customers want is misleading. What is Atlassian angle? Why pick up this specific request?

If the reason for Atlassian is to help customer start a pricing discussion, please also make sure to invest in app editions for DC. We are bound to your licensing strategy, don’t put the burden of the limitation on us.

If the reason for Atlassian is to remove cloud migration friction by encouraging customers to decommission apps, can you please stop talking about how valuable the Atlassian Economy is for Atlassian?

Looking forward to getting a better understanding of what Atlassian is trying to achieve here.

3 Likes

Hey @ademoss ,
To your questions. We don’t have anything yet for you to build on top of. But this is exactly what we want to hear from your opinion on how might Atlassian collaborate with App partners. And we see benefits for Admin users to know more about App usage, so if your app has usage data natively build in-app, it will be very helpful for admin.

We know Apps can do a million things in Jira that are all different. So our feature will be crystal clear to Admin users that those data are not what all Apps are doing and being used in the Jira instance, but a starting point for them to locate where to find more data and talk to teams and App builders.

Please do give you feedback in our [collaboration suggestion collection form](https://collaboration suggestion collection form 2)

Cheers
Mike Ni

@danielwester, thanks for the great question! We understand there is a risk users may not agree to give away the data. We will design those cases and make sure our App delivers a clear message where data is not obtainable. Since we are in the early Beta stage and have yet to build this UI part, I don’t have full details. Please stay tuned for our coming releases.
And can you please also provide such feedback through our collaboration suggestion collection form

Cheers
Mike Ni

Hi @remie sorry for the delay on this. The strategy for this is to be responsive to customer needs and product feedback we’ve received to ultimately improve the Data Center product experience.

A lot of our Enterprise customers are requesting more transparency regarding what is in their environments and how their teams use things. This helps customers think differently about their change management plans, helps them justify ROI and utilization to leadership or procurement teams when needed who may not be close to things, and also as apps change versions, maybe EOL’d by partners, etc. also helps them assess the impact to their users.

This was done completely independently of our cloud and cloud migration efforts. With that said, we do see large enterprise cloud customers often ask their teams and our sales teams about their organization’s utilization of different apps because, at higher levels of the company, they don’t always know. Sometimes customers do this to see if the app is still needed but often times its to assess the risk, complexity, and change management plans for their migration.

Since release, our cloud migrations teams do see some aspects that could add value for customers in our app assessment tooling but there are no active efforts or plans at this time. We’ll make sure to pass along the feedback that before anything kicks off it would be beneficial to run an RFC out to our community here on the topic.

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Are you also actively working on a Cloud version? What’s the timetable for that release? If that’s not a priority, why not? As others pointed out, there are dozens/hundreds of features that users have requested for Jira Data Center that are going unimplemented due to Atlassian’s all-out focus on Cloud. Why is this functionality a priority now for DC customers?

I agree that this product has benefit for Jira admins, but it would have been a helpful initiative to start 10 years ago. It sounds more like Atlassian’s not getting good enterprise conversion to Cloud and trying to reduce friction by giving customers reasons to abandon their DC apps.

Also, for the apps I’m involved with as a vendor, the metrics provided and proposed to-date by App Usage for Jira DC are too simplistic to be useful, to the point of being highly-misleading on actual app usage. For example: a) # of rows of AO tables used is meaningless unless you understand the underlying objects represented, and b) if an app doesn’t check the box on adding custom fields or workflows, to an unfamiliar Jira admin that might mean it’s not widely used. App vendors could contribute lots of actually-helpful usage metrics into a common Atlassian framework, but I expect you may find vendors indifferent or antagonistic toward this project unless it proves to be part of a broader, even-handed initiative across platforms, with actual benefits to vendors. That’s possible (support insight, extension of existing System Info view to include app-specific metrics, etc), but not well communicated here.

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