In this guide
Enhancing your Jira dashboards
Out-of-the-box Jira dashboards
Jira dashboards are designed to display the gadgets that keep track of a project’s metrics and data. Usually displayed as charts and graphs, 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 often limiting.
For example, the default Pie Chart gadget that Jira offers only allows you to select the project, the statistic type you want to display, and an auto-refresh option. For simple cases, this will likely be enough.
However, you’d likely want to improve your dashboards. For example, you’d 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.
Dashboard Hub for Jira
Dashboard Hub for Jira (and for Confluence) has been designed to solve those limitations, offering great customization and flexibility to your visualization and reporting. Build full-fledged dashboards and charts that meet your needs, improving your team’s work efficiency (see Dashboard Hub customer success story).
Build and organize the data displayed in charts with Custom Charts, share your reports internally and externally in an easy way with External Share, create your Central Data Hub in Jira by means of 70+ gadgets, pre-defined templates and 10+ integrations.
How to add custom charts with Dashboard Hub
Custom charts generates charts and graphs using JQL query search, a robust visualization and reporting tool that provides customization, flexibility and freedom. Add custom colors, reorder or hide segments to highlight the important part of your message… Build it the way that you want it.
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.
Start by filling in the display name and selecting the data source. By default, the data source selected will be the Jira instance you are currently on. Choose the Add data source option if you would like to add a new data source.
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.
How to share externally
Dashboard Hub gives you the ability to create unique external links for your dashboard, thereby enabling you to share your dashboards externally and securely to anyone. This feature, called Public Link or External Share, is one out of the multiple solutions that Dashboard Hub addresses when it comes to dealing with the limitations of a standard Jira dashboard.
To share your dashboard externally using Dashboard Hub, navigate to the target dashboard that you would like to share and click on the share icon found in the top right corner of the dashboard. Select the “public link” option (see image below) which generates a unique and secure link for you to use.
How to create a Central Hub for your organization
Wouldn’t it be more convenient and time-saving if you could view and access all of your information in a central location?
The Dashboard Hub for Jira and for Confluence app addresses this by creating a Central Data Hub. Unlike the default Jira dashboard that is built to work with the instance where it’s installed, Dashboard Hub connects with both the current instance as well as several Jira instances. This lets you keep your data centralized.
Centralizing key metrics in a single display provides you with a bird’s eye view of what is happening in your organization, plus saves you the inconvenience of jumping between platforms to check on the status of your projects and teams.
Dashboard Hub also gives your team a single reference point where they can analyze key statistics and be kept up-to-date on the relevant project information.
Add up to 70+ ready-to-go gadgets and metrics
In order to have a strong Central Data Hub, you need powerful and customizable charts and graphs. Dashboard Hub provides you with 70+ ready-to-go gadgets to customize and set up your dashboard according to your needs.
To add gadgets, first click on “Edit” while displaying your dashboard, and then on the Add gadget “+” icon.
How to use of pre-defined dashboard templates
If you don’t feel like building your own dashboard from scratch, no problem. You can set up instantly a full-fledged dashboard by loading one of our Pre-defined dashboard templates.
To select a Pre-defined Template, just choose the one you need when creating a new dashboard, on the “Template” section. Impossible to miss.
These dashboards are specifically designed for ITSM, Agile, DevOps teams and Atlassian Marketplace partners. Either way, you can use them as a starting point to build your custom dashboards, as you can add/remove any gadget out of the collection. Dashboard Hub is adjusted to your visualization and reporting needs.
Ease migration journey with Hybrid Dashboards
A Hybrid Dashboard is a dashboard that displays data from server, data center and/or cloud instances equally.
Creating a Hybrid Dashboard is as easy as adding datasources for the different types of hosting. In the image below:
1) By selecting a datasource that indicates “cloud”, like the Jira Cloud datasource type, you will be able to connect to a cloud instance.
2) By selecting a datasource that indicates “server/data center”, like the Confluence Server/Data Center datasource type, you will be able to connect to a server or data center instance.
Integrations
The core functionality provided by Dashboard Hub is the ability to connect a dashboard to other products in the Atlassian ecosystem such as Confluence, Bitbucket, and more: Jira Work Management, Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Statuspage, Opsgenie, Insight, Projectrak (third-party app from DEISER). Soon: BigPicture, Tempo, GitHub, etc. These connections can be established within seconds using either any of the free Dashboard Hub Connector apps or API tokens. The Dashboard Hub Connector apps are free apps that securely bridge the data coming from other products into Dashboard Hub.
In the above ITSM dashboard example, you can see several gadgets that are integrated from different tools such as Jira Service Management and StatusPage. The top left gadget displays Service Desk Queue data connected from a Jira Service Management instance while the bottom right gadget shows the Service Status information from a StatusPage instance. This works by using the Dashboard Hub Connector apps to integrate a specific datasource into each gadget.
Learn more about Dashboard Hub integrations here.
Interactive demos
Dashboard Hub for Jira lets you create custom charts and graphs to solve your reporting challenges. By connecting to data in other Atlassian apps such as Bitbucket, Confluence, or external Jira instances, you can easily customize your dashboards to meet specific needs of your team.
You can explore these demos to get a better feel of Dashboard Hub:
Learn more about Dashboard Hub for Confluence here.
Last updated: 2023-07-31
Iván García
Iván García is a product marketing manager at Appfire, managing product marketing for Appfire’s BI and Reporting category of apps.
See all content by Iván García
