Create and share a dashboard in Jira in less than a minute

Today we’re going to see how to create a Jira dashboard with Dashboard Hub for Jira, and share it externally in less than a minute. And we are using metrics and indicators for an ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) team.

If you google how to create a Jira dashboard, or directly navigate to YouTube, you won’t find any video to actually create a custom Jira dashboard with metrics/indicators in less than a minute. Either it takes around 10 minutes, or it is a blank dashboard. One of the main reasons is that there are no pre-defined templates for ITSM, Agile, DevOps or marketing teams. Well, there are none with ready-to-go Jira dashboard templates.

See our Jira pre-defined dashboard templates: Dashboards Templates: Teams and Use Cases.

How to create a Jira dashboard

What is a Jira dashboard?

A Jira dashboard is a display of information to track and monitor your project(s). In this way, your team (or you alone) disposes the metrics or key data indicators to analyze and report different aspects of the business: Team workload, SLA contracts, requests, incidents, projects’ status, etc. In other words, it’s an efficient way to track several data sources in real time, it’s a central hub to monitor all your corporate needs.

Steps to create an ITSM Jira dashboard

The first step to create a dashboard in Jira is to think who your target audience is and what are the metrics or indicators needed. We thought of a team of the ITSM department, so let’s prepare them an interesting custom Jira dashboard:

1. Choose Dashboards > Create dashboard.
2. Name your dashboard and add a description so your team knows when to use it.
3. Select the access permissions: Project, Group, My Organization or Private.
4. Click Save.

Now, you can start adding Jira gadgets:

1. Select Add gadget, click Load all gadgets.
2. Navigate to the Jira Service Management section and add both gadgets, Filter counts and Service project report.
3. Navigate to the Charts section and add the Created vs. Resolved Chart, the Resolution Time and the Time to First Response. Close the window.
4. Reorganize the layout and configure the five gadgets.

We find quite interesting these “counts” in the Filter counts gadget, and if you set targets for all of them, way better: “At risk – Time to first response”, “At risk – Time to resolution”, “Breached – Time to first response” and “Breached – Time to resolution”.

How to share Jira dashboards externally

Right now there is no way of sharing a Jira dashboard externally without opening your Jira instance to external users.

How to create dashboards in Jira with Dashboard Hub for Jira

The following video shows how to create and share a Jira dashboard, using Dashboard Hub for Jira, in less than a minute:

Let’s see what the steps are in the following section.

Steps to create an ITSM Jira dashboard

Go to the Apps menu in the Jira top navigation bar, and select Dashboard Hub for Jira (install it first).

1. At the top right select the ··· menu
2. Select Create Dashboard and name, describe and set the access restriction for your dashboard.
3. In the next screen, select the IT Service Management Team template.
4. Click Create.

Now, let’s configure our Jira dashboard gadgets, in this case we will be configuring only one Jira Service Management gadget, for example, the Time to First Response gadget, and automatically use the same configuration for the rest of the gadgets.

Since this template also has a Statuspage gadget, we need to configure it too, since the datasource is not Jira Service Management, just configure it and ready.

External share of your dashboard in Jira

You can allow people outside your organization to visualize your dashboards. And no, there’s no need to enable anonymous access to your Jira instance, just create a public link for your dashboard, and share it with your customers, service providers or any other project stakeholder that needs to be up to date. You can see an example here.

We have shown how to create an ITSM dashboard in Jira and using Dashboard Hub for Jira, what’s your way? Let us know what you think and what you would need ?

Last updated: 2023-07-31

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