Use case

There are times when it is useful for administrators to get a number of active users that are taking up license seats in Confluence. This feature exists in Confluence Admin > Licensing Details for non-Unlimited license tiers, but is not calculated for the Unlimited tier.

Organizations may need this information if they are evaluating moving to a non-Unlimited license tier, or for general auditing purposes.

Existing solutions and their limitations

In the UI, Confluence Admin > System Information will show a count of users. However this is simply a sum of all users stored in the cwd_user table of the database, and does not take in account of which users are marked as Active or check whether they belong in a Global Permissions group. The actual subset of active users counting towards the license can be much smaller.

There is also a popular KB which uses SQL queries to get a count of active users which do take up a seat. However, as stated on the KB, a major caveat is that nested groups will not be counted correctly due to the recursive manner in which user/group/membership objects are stored in the database. It is not uncommon for accounts using an unlimited license to also have nested groups (i.e. configured in LDAP).

Older tickets on this topic

The following were closed years ago due to various reasons but none of them address the caveats outlined above. Given the age of these tickets I've opted to open a new request instead of reopening an old one, as some of the comments/attachments contained are now obsolete.

• CONFSERVER-11205
• CONFSERVER-26410
• CONFSERVER-17575