Troubleshooting Problems and Requesting Technical Support
This document tells you how to troubleshoot problems in Confluence and how to obtain technical support from Atlassian.
Troubleshooting a problem
If you have a problem with Confluence, follow the steps below.
To diagnose a problem and search for a solution:
- If you are not a Confluence administrator, report your problem to the person in charge of your Confluence site and ask them to follow up on the issue.
- Use the health check and log scanner (see below) to check your Confluence logs for errors and attempt to match them against known issues in our knowledge base and bug tracker.
- Check our knowledge base for solutions to known issues.
- Check our issue tracker for known bugs.
- If your problem may be related to an add-on, you can run Confluence in Safe Mode or temporarily disable any third party add-ons.
- If you are having problems configuring a feature, please take a look at the appropriate guides:
- Check the following guides for troubleshooting specific problems:
- Issues related to your database server: Database Troubleshooting.
- Issues related to user management: Requesting Support for External User Management.
- Issues related to performance: Requesting Performance Support.
- If the above tools and documentation don't solve your problem, you can create a support request and attach your support zip file. If you think you may have found a bug, you can create a bug report instead.
On this page:
Related pages:
Using the Health Check
The Confluence Health Check provides a simple way to check the set up of your Confluence instance. The health check looks at things like your license validity, basic database setup and more.
To access the health check go to 
> General Configuration > Support Tools.
The health check will let you know if there are any problems.
Scanning your Confluence logs to match known issues
Confluence has an inbuilt log scanner that will check your Confluence logs for errors and try to match them against known issues in our knowledge base and bug tracker. You'll need Confluence Administrator or System Administrator permissions to do this.
To use the Confluence log scanner:
- Go to > General Configuration > Support Tools > Log Scanner.
- Choose Scan to scan the Confluence log file in its default location (change the location if necessary).
- The log scanner will return a list of links, pointing to articles in our knowledge base and/or bug reports in our issue tracker.
- The latest-reported problems are displayed first. By default only the most recent 10 matches are displayed. If you have more than 10 matches and want to display all results, click the 'Show All' link that appears on the top of the results page.
- Choose a link to read the reported problem and possible solutions or workarounds.
Raise a support request with an add-on vendor
If you have an add-on related issue, please check whether the add-on is supported by Atlassian or a third party developer.
- Check support information for the add-on on the Atlassian Marketplace
- If the plugin is not supported by Atlassian, you'll need to contact the plugin developer directly.
You can read more about Atlassian support for add-ons.
Raise a support request
There are two ways to raise a support request with Atlassian - from within Confluence, or via our support site.
If your problem concerns user management or performance, please take a look at the additional requirements in Requesting Support for External User Management or Requesting Performance Support before creating a request. .
Method 1: Create a support request from within Confluence
This is the most convenient method, however if your zip file is too large, or there are security restrictions on your mail server, your request may not be correctly sent. You can also use this method to append system information to an existing support request.
You'll need Confluence Administrator or System Administrator permissions to do this. Your site will also need a mail server set up that allows you to send zip files.
To create a support request:
- Go to > General Configuration > Support Tools > Create Support Request.
- Provide as much information as possible, following these guidelines:
- Contact Email - this defaults to the email address of the logged-in user. It will be used to find your support account or, if no account is found, to create a new account. Confluence will send all further notifications and updates to this address.
- Summary - enter a short description of the problem.
- Description - enter as much information as possible, including any error messages that are appearing or any steps our support team can take to reproduce the problem.
- Support Data to Attach - choose the log and configuration information you would like to include. These will be attached to your support request as a zip file, and will help our support engineers resolve your problem. Refer to Working with Confluence Logs for information about the log files.
Log files can be very large (up to 20mb with the default log4j configuration, or more if you've customized the log settings) and your mail server may bounce the message if it is too large.
- Choose Send.
We recommend checking whether the email message has been successfully sent, and contacting your email administrator if you need special provisions for this email message.
Confluence will submit your request via email to Atlassian support. If you don't already have a support account, we'll automatically create one for you. You'll receive email updates about the request progress. You can also view the status of your support request and add any additional information at any time at Atlassian Support.
Screenshot: The support request form.
Method 2: Create a support request at our support site
If your Confluence instance is not running, or does not have a mail server configured, you use the Atlassian Support site to create a request.
To create a support request:
- If you don't have a free Atlassian support account, create one here.
- Log in to https://support.atlassian.com.
- Follow the prompts to choose your product and type of request.
- Provide us as much information as possible about your problem, and your Confluence environment.
(If Confluence is running, you can go to System Information in the administration console and copy that information into your request). You may also want to attach:- A support zip. See Creating a support zip to find out how to generate it.
- Your log files (if your instance won't start up). See Working with Confluence Logs to find out how to access your log files.
You'll receive email updates about the request progress, and see the status of your request at any time in the Support site.
Creating a support zip file
We recommend that you attach a support zip file to every interaction with our support team. You'll need Confluence Administrator or System Administrator permissions to create a support zip.
To create a support zip:
- Go to > General Configuration > Support Tools > Create Support Zip.
- Keep all checkboxes selected then choose Create.
- Confluence will create the support zip file and display its location on the screen. Log in to the Confluence server to retrieve the file.
You can then attach the zip file to your support request (a new request or an existing one).
Screenshot: Creating a support zip file
Logging a bug
If you have found a bug, the easiest way to report it is to create numbered instructions on how to reproduce the bug, create a support request, as described above, and then the Atlassian support team will confirm your bug and lodge a bug report.
Alternatively, you can check to see if anyone else has reported the bug, then log a bug report yourself.
To report a bug:
- Go to the Confluence issue tracker.
- Type keywords for your problem into the Contains text search box then click the Search icon
- Read through the summaries of the bugs shown. If any summary describes your problem, you can watch the issue to be notified when something changes, or add more information as a comment.
- If there's no existing bugs that match your problem, you can create a new bug report - including any information on how to duplicate the problem.
Sometimes it may be useful to include the result of the 500 error page, which you will find at this location:
https://<domain><host>:<port>/500page.jsp