Jira User License Count on Atlassian OnDemand

Recently I migrated a locally hosted JIRA instance to Atlassian OnDemand. One of the first things I noticed was the absence of a little message at the top of the [Users] page of the [Administration] section that users of locally hosted JIRA would be familiar with: "There are currently X total user(s) set up in JIRA, of which Y are active and count towards your license limit".

When you host JIRA locally, the user count that goes toward your license limit is the number of "active" users, active meaning a user is a member of a group that has the 'Jira Users' permission. This means you can have a 10 user license with 30 users in the system, as long as only 10 are in 'JIRA User' groups and therefore active - this is needed because when a developer leaves you don't want to delete him and destroy every reference to him throughout the system leaving people wondering who resolved what.

After creating my first user in OnDemand JIRA, I noticed the number of licenses I had left to give was far fewer than what I was expecting, I had roughly 20 users in the system with only about 15 being active in 'JIRA User' groups on a 25 user license and it was telling me I only had 5 licenses to go. That's because OnDemand manages your "active" users a little differently...

User Access in OnDemand JIRA

As an administrator, go to [Administration] -> [Users] -> [Application Access], you'll see a table with your users and all the Atlassian OnDemand applications (even the ones you don't subscribe to), under the name of the app is how many licenses you have left to give, and goes without saying the users whose checkboxes are checked are your active users.

Pretty simple thing but can take a while to figure out what the hell is going on if you don't know the difference between the two systems - hope this saves somebody else a bit of time =)