Atlassian Confluence Monitoring on Microsoft SCOM
As part of a customer project, we developed a custom Confluence Management Pack for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). This tailored solution enables IT operations teams to monitor key performance and health metrics of Confluence environments, ensuring knowledge-sharing platforms remain available and performant.
With this Use Case paper, we want to share our knowledge with the SCOM Community to highlight the possibilities of advanced monitoring on Microsoft SCOM, helping teams get better in their day-to-day tasks.
What is Confluence by Atlassian
Confluence by Atlassian is a collaborative workspace platform designed to help teams create, organize, and share knowledge efficiently. It enables users to produce dynamic, content-rich pages that facilitate project documentation, meeting notes, knowledge bases, and more.
Integrated with Atlassian’s suite of tools such as Jira, Confluence supports real-time collaboration, version control, and structured content organization, making it ideal for agile teams and enterprises seeking to streamline communication and documentation workflows.
Why Monitor Atlassian Confluence?
Monitoring Atlassian Confluence is essential because it often serves as a central hub for collaboration, documentation, and knowledge sharing within an organization. Ensuring smooth operation is critical to maintaining productivity, minimizing downtime, and protecting sensitive information.
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Key Atlassian Confluence Monitoring Areas
Monitoring Confluence across performance, availability, and security dimensions ensures a reliable, efficient, and secure collaboration platform. This not only minimizes disruptions but also supports compliance and operational transparency in enterprise environments.
Application Performance
Integration Security: Monitor the security status of connected services (e.g., Jira, LDAP, identity providers).
Page Load Times: Monitor the speed of page loading, especially for pages with macros or large attachments.
Search Responsiveness: Delays in search functionality can impact user efficiency.
API Response Times: Important for integrations with other tools (e.g., Jira).
Plugin/Macro Performance: Identify issues caused by third-party or custom add-ons.
Availability
Uptime and Reachability: Ensure the service is accessible 24/7, especially in global or remote teams.
Error Rates: Track HTTP errors (e.g., 500, 503) to identify backend issues.
Service Health Checks: Monitor background services like indexing, email delivery, and scheduled jobs.
Database Connectivity: Failures or latency in database access can cause significant outages.
Security
Authentication and Access Logs: Track failed login attempts, unusual login locations, or Single Sign-On (SSO) issues.
Permission Changes: Monitor changes to admin privileges and access to restricted spaces.
Vulnerability Management: Identify outdated or vulnerable plugins and core components.
Audit Trails: Capture and review configuration changes, content deletions, or permission updates.
Confluence Monitoring – Key Technical Areas for SCOM Admins
These are the most important aspects to consider when monitoring Atlassian Confluence from the perspective of a Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) administrator.
Application Availability & Performance
Deadlocked threads: Detects serious concurrency issues that may cause parts of the application to freeze.
URL monitoring (HTTP/HTTPS): Ensures core Confluence pages and APIs are reachable and not returning errors.
Synthetic transactions: Simulates user behavior to detect real-world availability and functionality issues.
Response time metrics: Identify performance degradation trends before users report issues.
JVM & System Resources
Heap memory (used/committed/max): Monitors memory consumption to prevent out-of-memory crashes.
Non-heap memory: Tracks memory used by class metadata and buffers, which can also cause memory pressure.
Garbage collection time and frequency: High GC activity can indicate memory tuning issues or leaks.
JVM-specific CPU usage: Helps isolate performance issues caused by inefficient Java code or plugins.
Overall host CPU consumption: Ensures the server isn’t CPU-starved due to competing processes or load.
Thread count (live, peak, daemon): High thread usage can be a sign of deadlocks or excessive parallelism.
Database Connectivity & Health
Database availability: Confirms Confluence can reach and query its backend DB without issues.
Active JDBC connections: Indicates the number of database connections in use and helps identify saturation risks.
Idle JDBC connections: Ensures the connection pool is being managed efficiently.
Connection wait times: Long wait times suggest a bottleneck in DB access or connection pooling.
Last index date/time: A stale index can result in incomplete search results and a degraded user experience.
Queued indexing jobs: Helps detect backlogs that may delay content visibility or updates.
Confluence Application Services
Email delivery success/failure: Identifies issues with outbound email configuration or delivery failures.
Scheduled job execution: Identifies delays or failures in critical background jobs like indexing or email.
Job queue length and execution duration: Indicates whether background tasks are keeping up or falling behind.
Critical add-ons status: Plugin failures can break key user workflows or admin capabilities.
Errors in plugin logs: Surface issues caused by incompatible or malfunctioning plugins.
Outbound mail queue length: Large queues may mean users aren’t receiving notifications timely.
Logs and Event Monitoring
Audit logs (admin changes, access attempts): Monitors for unauthorized access or misconfigurations.
Log file scanning: Captures error signatures and early warnings directly from the application logs.
Disk and File System Monitoring
Temp directory usage: Ensures temp files don’t grow uncontrollably and impact performance.
Disk space in app/data/backup directories: Prevents service disruptions due to full storage.
File descriptor usage: On Unix-based systems, running out of file handles can crash the app.
Integration & External Dependencies
Cloud or proxy connectivity: Identifies issues with CDN/proxy access if Confluence is deployed behind one.
LDAP/SSO connectivity: Validates that authentication and user sync integrations are functioning.
SMTP server availability: Ensures Confluence can send critical notifications and password resets.
AppLink health (Jira, Bitbucket, etc.): Checks the connectivity and functionality of linked Atlassian tools.
User Session Metrics
Login failure rates: High failure rates could indicate user issues, lockouts, or possible brute-force attempts.
Active user sessions: Measures current load and usage patterns on the platform.
Session duration trends: Helps detect unusual patterns that may indicate performance or security issues.
Atlassian Confluence Monitoring Use Cases
Monitoring Atlassian Confluence can significantly improve system reliability, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency. Here are four real-world use cases that illustrate how monitoring Confluence helps save time, money, and nerves.
Avoiding Downtime During Critical Work Periods
Use Case
A multinational company uses Confluence for cross-team documentation, product roadmaps, and project management. During quarterly planning, thousands of users access it daily.
How Monitoring Helps
- Reduces support ticket volume from frustrated users.
- Real-time uptime monitoring alerts IT if Confluence becomes slow or unresponsive.
- Automatic incident notifications enable quick investigation and resolution.
Benefits
- Prevents delays in planning or product launches.
- Saves hours of lost productivity across teams.
Detecting Performance Degradation Before Users Complain
Use Case
An internal IT team notices reports of “sluggish” Confluence performance, but complaints only trickle in after days of user frustration.
How Monitoring Helps
- Maintain a positive user experience, lowering team frustration.
- Track key metrics like page load time, search latency, and plugin performance.
- Use historical trends to flag gradual degradation before it affects users.
Benefits
- Proactively fixes issues, reducing the number of support escalations.
- Save employee time spent trying to use slow systems.
Preventing Outages Due to Plugin or Integration Failures
Use Case
Confluence is integrated with Jira, Git, and a custom SSO system. After a new plugin is installed, a memory leak causes crashes over the weekend.
How Monitoring Helps
- Tracks CPU, memory usage, and plugin behavior.
- Sends alerts on unusual resource usage or error spikes.
Benefits
- Prevent unscheduled outages and emergency weekend firefighting.
- Avoid costly downtime and incident recovery costs.
- Reduce stress for IT and operations teams.
Optimizing Resource Allocation and Licensing
Use Case
A company is scaling and unsure if its Confluence instance needs more memory, a bigger server, or a higher-tier license.
How Monitoring Helps
- Tracks usage patterns, peak traffic, and API load.
- Helps IT make data-driven decisions about scaling and licensing.
Benefits
- Avoid overpaying for unnecessary resources.
- Preventing under-provisioning leading to outages.
- Save money while ensuring high performance.
We hope this Atlassian Confluence Monitoring Use Case paper inspires you to extend your monitoring on Microsoft SCOM. Feel free to reach out for help building your next custom Management Pack.
NiCE Services and Training for Microsoft SCOM
NiCE Services & Training for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) offers specialized expertise in enhancing IT monitoring through the development of custom Management Packs tailored to an organization’s unique infrastructure and business needs.
By leveraging NiCE’s deep knowledge of SCOM, their services empower IT teams to extend native monitoring capabilities, enabling precise, scalable, and efficient oversight of complex environments. The custom management packs crafted by NiCE address specific applications, devices, and services not covered by default SCOM templates, ensuring comprehensive visibility and proactive issue detection.
In addition to bespoke management pack creation, NiCE provides targeted training to equip IT professionals with the skills to maintain, customize, and optimize SCOM environments independently. This combination of tailored solutions and knowledge transfer significantly improves operational reliability, reduces downtime, and maximizes the return on investment in Microsoft SCOM deployments.