The Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) adds pages to Atlassian applications for finding, installing, and administering plugins. UPM works across Atlassian applications, providing a consistent interface for administering plugins in JIRA, Confluence, Stash, Bamboo, FishEye and Crucible.
A plugin is a software component, usually in the form of a JAR file, that supplements, enhances or customizes the functionality of an Atlassian application in some way. The capability added by a plugin may be narrowly focused, such as a macro for Confluence. Or it may add a large set of features to the application, enough to be considered a product of its own, such as Greenhopper for JIRA.
Many core features of Atlassian products, such as the UPM itself, are actually implemented as plugins. These types of plugins are called system plugins. You can supplement these system plugins with plugins from the Atlassian Marketplace or plugins you create yourself with the plugin SDK.
On this page:
Exploring the UPM Interface
You can access the UPM pages in your application in the administration section of your application. The Navigating to the Universal Plugin Manager page describes how to access the UPM interface in each Atlassian application, specifically, the page for viewing and managing plugins.
The UPM add several pages to the application administration interface, including:
- Manage Plugins – Provides controls for installing, updating, configuring, and disabling plugins.
- Find New Plugins (not available in offline mode) – Enables you to explore and install plugins from Atlassian Marketplace, from within the application interface.
- Plugin Audit Log – Displays logged events relating to the plugin manager.
- Product Update Check (not available in offline mode) – Reports whether installed plugins are compatible with available updates for this product.
- OSGi (available only in development mode) – Provides information about the underlying OSGi infrastructure that is particularly useful for troubleshooting plugins.
The pages are accessible through the administration menu in the interface, as shown in the Confluence administration page. 
Manage plugins page in Confluence
About user access
As an administration component of the Atlassian application, the UPM pages are only accessible to users with administrator privileges. An exception applies to the page for finding new plugins. It is accessible to any user. The 'Find Plugins' page allows users to discover plugins and request plugins from their administrators. The plugin request page is visible by default, but the administrator may choose to disable it.
For plugin administration, Atlassian recommends that only a single administrator attempts to access the UPM interface at a time. To prevent potential conflicts, the UPM blocks other users from accessing the UPM while a plugin is being installed or updated. The blocked user sees a message indicating the user name of the administrator who is performing the installation or update operation.
If the websudo feature is enabled for the Atlassian host application, the UPM administration pages are also subject to the controls imposed by websudo. This feature, which mimics the Linux sudo feature, requires administrators who are logged into the Atlassian application to reenter their password each time they attempt to perform an administrative function.
Viewing UPM notifications
Plugin notifications provide information specifically related to plugin events and conditions. You can access plugin notifications from any page of the Universal Plugin Manager. Notifications appear for events such as when a plugin update is available, a user requests a plugin, or a plugin is installed or removed.
The Universal Plugin Manager notification icon appears at the top right corner of any Universal Plugin Manager page. The icon shows the number of new unread notifications there are. When you click the icon, the notification appear. 
Plugin Notifications in JIRA
Overview
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