We introduced a new space-level-permission on pages which restrict who is allowed to set page-level-permissions.

We will also provide an overview of pages were permissions have been set. It will list the user who set the permission and the group, if applicable, which has permission to the page.

I'm not concerned of the UI used to lock the pages, I'm concerned of how an admin will be able to check which pages have restricted access in a space and which groups have been used for those pages. We have a large user base with a large amount of groups and it'll be a matter of time before each space has page restrictions using multiple groups...

Ideally you'd provide a preference to turn this feature for individual spaces and allow defining which groups can be used for each space (kind of like Jira's schemes). This would also provide a mechanism to control who can restrict access - if you don't belong to a group which can be used for restricting access, you can't set page level permissions.

The UI will look similar to the current "lock pages" UI. You will be able to give view and edit permission either to a group you are a member of, or restrict this permission to yourself. This should be simple enough and won't be hard to administrate.

When implementing this, please be extra careful to create UI solutions which make it very clear to users on who can see/edit each page. Even as it is, regular users have no way of knowing who can see each space which is problematic and if the next version of Confluence both makes it hard to check both space- and page-level access, it'll be an administrative nightmare.