Enhancing your dashboard charts in Jira through Dashboard Hub
Enhancing your dashboard charts in Jira through Dashboard Hub
Jira dashboards are designed to display the gadgets that keep track of a project’s metrics and data. Usually displayed as charts, these dashboards are useful because they give you the power to view everything that’s going on in a project at a glance. While Jira offers out of the box gadgets that will generate charts for you, these charts are currently incredibly limiting.
For example, the default Pie Chart gadget that Jira offers only allows you to select the project, the statistic type that you want to display, and an auto-refresh option. For simple cases, this might be enough. However, it’s common to want to set the colors for each statistic type, select custom fields, or perform extra calculations by accessing aggregations to calculate sums, min or max values, average, etc.
Fortunately, there are multiple apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace that can solve these limitation issues for you. One of those apps is Dashboard Hub for Jira, built to overcome any shortcomings related to a standard Jira dashboard by offering the ability to create custom charts for your reporting needs. Not only does Dashboard Hub solve the lack of customization in Jira chart gadgets, it also allows you to connect your dashboard to other Atlassian apps such as Bitbucket, Confluence, or even external Jira instances (view the list of integrations here), plus you can share your dashboard externally through a secure external link. You can also opt to get started quickly by loading a pre-defined dashboard template with more than 60 gadgets.
Adding custom charts with Dashboard Hub
Add custom charts into your dashboard by selecting the JQL Search gadget under the Jira section. The gadget will then appear in your dashboard. Next, configure the gadget by clicking Config.
Next, select the scope of information that you want to display by selecting either Filter or Custom JQL. For simple use cases, the Filter option should be enough because it allows you to select an item from your existing filters. Custom JQL should be the option to use if you would like to perform more complex filtering since it uses the Jira Query Language to help you narrow down your selections. For example, if you would like to display only the issues where the status is In Progress and sorted by date, the JQL Query representation would be:
Once you have finalized your filter, click the Load button.
Now, select the type of view that you want to use. The view types include table, line chart, pie chart, bar chart, tile chart, grouped bar chart, stacked bar chart, and multi-line chart. Depending on the view you use, there will be additional fields that you need to configure. For example, if you are using a Pie Chart view, you will have to configure the Chart By value, which is the field that you want to chart against.
Additionally, you will also need to select the Aggregation type and value. Aggregation options include count, mean, min, max, and sum. A chart display will automatically generate depending on the fields you selected.
Once you are done, click Save and the chart will be automatically generated into your dashboard.
Advanced charts with date and time fields
A really powerful mechanism to make the most of your data is the ability to use data and time fields. Imagine you need to display the total time your teammates estimated for a given project. Well, no problem, select the view type that best displays the information, like the Tile Chart (View Type), select the Original estimate (Field) and Sum (Aggregation) it:
Summary
When creating dashboards, it’s useful to utilize Jira’s default chart gadgets to illustrate simple datasets. However, these gadgets do not offer key features or functionality you may need such as performing aggregations on data, executing complex filtering of issues, and customizing chart colors. Dashboard Hub’s custom charts feature was created to solve these issues, so you can gain a customized visualization of your data and metrics at a glance.
Not currently a Dashboard Hub user? Click here to try Dashbord Hub for Jira (and for Confluence) and benefit immediately from this powerful app.
