5 Useful Reports for Jira Service Management Support Teams

If you’re a team using Jira Service Management (JSM) to manage your work, you may be frustrated with the limited reporting available natively. Built-in JSM reports are powerful but not very flexible or customizable. If you are already using Custom Charts for Jira for easier dashboarding, or just looking to improve your JSM reporting, Custom Charts can easily be extended to your service projects. Let’s walk through how they can help make your job a little easier.

Created vs Resolved

The Created vs Resolved report offers teams a nice, at-a-glance view of whether they are keeping up with all of the work that is coming in. In line graph form, the report compares the number of tickets created with the number of tickets resolved over a specific time period.

The Created vs Resolved chart that comes built into Jira gets the basic job done, but the lack of customization may prevent you from getting your message across in the way you intend. By contrast, creating a version of this chart using Custom Charts for Jira lets you change colors, labels, filter the data, and add a description – none of which you can do in native Jira. This means you’re able to make the report look and function exactly how you want it to.

Custom Charts can also be linked to a Simple Search gadget to dynamically filter the dates. You don’t have to decide how far back you want to view the Created vs Resolved chart when setting up the dashboard, as you or your colleagues can decide what they want to see at any moment.

Workload Reporting

Part of managing a service desk is ensuring that your agents are able to stay on top of their workload. Understanding how the work is distributed can help you provide support to team members who may have too much on their plate. A simple pie chart based on Assignee can begin to give you that insight. Select individual assignees to drill down into which issues they are working on, or filter the chart as a whole to only show issues that meet certain criteria.

The out-of-the-box Jira pie chart gadget can work for you if you are happy reporting on the data in a fairly raw state. If you’re looking to show/hide specific assignees, chart by estimates, or customize the colors displayed, then Custom Charts for Jira will be required to get the flexibility you need.

The pie chart above is showing workload based on issue count, but with Custom Charts you could also view the same report based on the original or remaining estimate, or time spent on the issues.

Organizations

The native reporting on Organizations in Jira Service Management leaves a lot to be desired. Service desk customers can be grouped into Organizations to clearly define your customer base and allow customers the ability to see their colleagues’ requests. However, many of the out-of-the-box reports don’t allow you to chart by Organization. Custom Charts for Jira does. Reports can be built representing Organizations just like any other field in your instance, as you can see in the Custom Charts-produced funnel chart above.

This chart, in particular, is a great way to visualize where your requests are coming from. It can be expanded so you can drill into the issues and identify trends. For example, it would be useful to know if one organization submits lots of feature requests while another submits lots of bugs. That information can be used to spark conversations and ensure your customers are happy.

SLA Reporting

Speaking of customer happiness, one of the tools that service desks should be using to ensure they are setting and meeting expectations are service-level agreements (SLAs). Jira Service Management projects will come with a few SLAs by default, but this is a great opportunity to customize the expectations for your team by creating your own SLAs. If you are seeing a lot of breached SLAs, this means your team is often not able to meet expectations in time and it is worth evaluating how this can be improved.

You do have the option of creating SLA reports in your JSM Custom Reports tab, which can give you a good basic line chart to represent a single project’s SLAs.

However, you can’t build these reports on a Jira dashboard with out-of-the-box JSM. You can only use the Service Project Report gadget, which pulls already-made SLA project reports onto the dashboard, but you have to make the individual project reports first.

To make SLA reports directly on a Jira dashboard, you need Custom Charts for Jira. With Custom Charts, you can create reports tracking SLAs over multiple projects and visualize them in countless different ways, like with the stacked bar chart pictured above. Not only that but you can create charts that display the averages of your SLA figures and filter them by request type, assignee, and other custom fields, without writing any Jira Query Language (JQL). These are also things you can’t do natively.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Reporting

Customer satisfaction is another key metric for service management teams and is extremely useful to help monitor that your customers are happy with their experience of your service desk.

The chart above uses the native CSAT functionality (the Satisfaction field in Jira), which can be enabled per individual service project. It sends an email to customers when their request is resolved to ask for a rating between 1 and 5 stars. With this information, it is easy to create reports that show the distribution of satisfaction ratings from your customers.

The single CSAT report that ships with JSM is one of the most limited reports: a simple table that only allows you to filter by dates that the rating was received to view a list and average of the results for a single project. With Custom Charts for Jira, you can create many different types of charts. Most importantly you can display data spanning multiple projects, with the ability to filter it down further based on data points like assignee, project, or any other custom field.

Customize the colors of your chart to make the report even clearer. You can see that the team in the chart above is doing pretty well, although there are a few customers that were not happy with their service.

Using Custom Charts for Jira

Simple reporting is one thing, but reporting that is still powerful while being easy to use is another entirely.

We know two things to be true:

1. Jira’s out-of-the-box reports don’t cover everything that you need to report on, and
2. You don’t have hours or days to learn how to use a new tool.

The powerful customizations and simple editor that Custom Charts for Jira provide mean that any user can create a dynamic dashboard in just a few minutes.

Users can create charts that simply aren’t possible natively, including bar charts (standard, stacked, or grouped), line charts, and more. In fact, all of the charts that you’ve seen on this page today were created with a single dashboard gadget.

Select the source, type of chart, and what you want to report on and you have a functional report in seconds. You can customize it to look exactly how you want with an easy color-picker, drag and drop functionality, and the ability to hide or rename the segments shown on the chart.

If you want slightly more advanced charts, you can use custom JQL or even calculate the sum or average Story Points or Time Spent on issues.

Conclusion

Understanding what customers are asking for, whether agents are keeping on top of what they’re asking for, and whether customers are happy with the resolutions you’re giving them, is all essential knowledge for a support team.

But procuring and sharing this knowledge can only be achieved with good reporting. And while native reporting in Jira is a good start, it probably won’t give you all the insights you need to make your teams better at delivering what your customers want. Only reporting that can be customized to display the data you want to display, in the way you want to display it, can really do that. That’s where a data visualization tool like Custom Charts for Jira becomes vital. And while many visualization tools require training and a ton of patience before you can use them, reports built using Custom Charts are just as easy to create as their native counterparts.

This article has more on the native reporting options in Jira Service Management for support teams.

You can also read more about the importance of visualizing your data in the right ways in When Data Visualization Really Isn’t Useful (and When It Is) and Make Better Jira Reports with Jira Visualization.