Getting started with JIRA dashboards

SquaredUp is a data visualization tool that can connect to a variety of data sources to bring the data together in a single pane of glass. In this blog we will connect our JIRA and Confluence instances to SquaredUp using the built-in plugins and create dashboards for them.

Connecting to the data source

Head over to the workspace you created, and add a data source.

As you can see, all it requires is some basic configuration for authentication using the API token which you can obtain using the documentation.

I will input my details here and hit Test and add. Assuming everything is configured well, it will add the data source and index the objects.

I've also gone ahead and installed the out-of-the-box dashboards.

Exploring the OOB dashboards

The data source comes with 2 out-of-the-box dashboards, Bug Analysis and Project Summary.

The Bug Analysis dashboard displays all the key information about bugs raised in JIRA, including MTTR, assignees, and trends,etc.

The Project Summary dashboard is more high-level, showing statistics about Issues, Bugs, Epics, and so on. This is a great dashboard for managers to keep track of multiple aspects of a project in one place.

If you're curious, you can go ahead and look at the configuration of these dashboards to see how they're created.

Creating our own dashboard

Now let's explore the plugin ourselves and see what we can plot on our dashboard. Let's start by creating a new dashboard, and then a new tile.

There are a few data streams here that we can use. First, let's start with the Issues data stream.

This will return all the objects that have been indexed by the plugin. Let's apply some filters to see only the Issue items we care about at the moment. I've applied a filter on "Issue Type", so it has presented to me all the types that exist such as features, bugs, epics, work tasks and so on.

Let's go ahead and show all the projects we have.

And just like that we have all the Projects in our organization. With a little bit of data shaping, I will group these projects by status column.

And finally, I will show them in a nice donut graph. You can choose a bar graph as well.

The JQL Query data stream allows you to create visualizations using JQL queries. In a JQL query you can specify exactly what you want to show, saving a significant load on the API otherwise having to return everything and then apply filters later. This is especially helpful in larger environments where there are hundreds and thousands of objects.

Let's go ahead and see how this works. Select the JQL query data stream. No need to select any specific objects here since it runs at the data source level.

As you reach the Parameters modal, you'll notice there's a sample JQL query for reference. This one displays all the Issues created in the last 30 days and arranges them latest first.

Let's try with a different query. I'll use:

issuekey IN updatedBy("Sameer Mhaisekar", "-2w")

This query returns all the issues that have been updated by a user in the last 2 weeks.

From the right side I can select the suitable visualization for my data. For now, I'll select the scalar tile to see the number of issues updated.

Just a click of a button, and it's done!

Next steps – Monitoring and notifications

SquaredUp monitoring makes it easy to turn our dashboard tiles into monitors, so that we can be alerted about changes. For example, I can configure the dashboard above to send me a notification if the number is outside the threshold I configured.

For example, I want to be notified if there have been no updates in the last week, so I simply toggle on monitoring and set a threshold.

Not only can I see this in SquaredUp, I can also set up notifications to let me know if any alerts are raised so I can be made aware any time. They can be sent as an email, as an IM message or forwarded over to any of your automation workflows.

If the monitor triggers, we can receive a notification via email, Slack, Teams or any system that supports webhooks.

Sharing is very simple in SquaredUp. We simply hit the share button, which pulls up the options of inviting a user to the workspace, or sharing just the dashboard via a link:

Get started with SquaredUp

From this point on, you can try out different data streams and queries to create the JIRA dashboard of your dreams. In addition, we also have many other plugins including Azure, Confluence, AWS and many more!

Sign up for free and explore the power of SquaredUp yourself.

Happy dashboarding!