New Features Released for Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence

Version 4.3.16 of Custom Charts for Jira and Custom Charts for Confluence has launched! Now available from the Atlassian Marketplace (and automatically rolled out to Jira Cloud users), it comes with some awesome new features you’re going to want to start using right away.

Calculate more, see more

The calculate functionality just got a whole lot better! If you’ve used this before, you’re probably already familiar with the ability to Count or calculate a Sum or Average of your number fields like Story Points or Cost.

Many of our users have been aching to replace a few of the lackluster reports in native Jira, such as Time to Resolution and Average Age, with pretty Custom Charts versions. So with Version 4.3.16 of Custom Charts, you can now calculate some new things:

1. Time until a specific date
2. Time since a specific date
3. Time between two dates
4. Time to resolution

Simply use date or date-time fields in Jira to calculate things like how long until your issues are due, or how long it’s been since they were created.

The time to resolution option will also allow you to include or exclude unresolved issues in the count. So if you’ve resolved issues quickly, but have a lot of stale open tickets, you can choose whether or not they should be included in your charts.

Checking average age and time to resolution is essential for many teams, especially teams in Jira Service Management. With Custom Charts, these reports are easier than ever to create and allow you to visualize better how your team is doing.

More advanced Simple Search options for power users

Simple Search power users, this update is for you. The Simple Search gadget now comes with some advanced customization options and covers a whole load more use cases.

With this release, you can now:

1. Reuse existing Saved Filters by adding a single filter button to your Simple Search
2. Write your own Jira Query Language (JQL) and add a JQL button to your Simple Search
3. Add a multi-select filter dropdown to allow users to select from existing Saved Filters
4. Add a description to your Simple Search, just like you’ve been doing in Custom Charts
5. Filter by currentUser() on single user-picker fields

With the addition of Saved Filter and JQL buttons, you can now construct complex queries while you’re building Simple Search, but display just a simple button to your end users. This means that you get even more powerful filtering options, without making things too complex for users who may not be as familiar with the underlying data.

See in the image above how just a few buttons can actually hold a complex and powerful query. Build your Simple Search once, and then you’re just a click away from filtering your dashboard exactly how you want it.

Dark mode is here!

Have you been hankering to turn to the dark side? Well now you can! Dark mode can be enabled in the Custom Charts and Simple Search gadgets in both Jira and Confluence, changing the color scheme so that all text shows up white or grey against a black screen.

Dark mode reduces the light emitted by your device screens while maintaining the color contrast ratios necessary for good readability. The inability to view Jira in dark mode is a thorn in many people’s sides (including our own), so we’ve introduced dark mode to Custom Charts to make using your Jira dashboards less painful.

And a little bit more!

We’ve added some additional smaller features to enhance your experience of Custom Charts even more.

Now you can:

• Group your issues per hour when using date fields to get even more granular in your reporting
• Display a total on your Tile Charts to help you understand the data even better
• Select from additional number formats so international teams can see the data in a way that makes sense

Spoiler alert… Shared Dashboards and Templates are coming!

Keep an eye out for Custom Charts Templates in our upcoming releases. These will give you some basic frameworks so you don’t have to start from scratch with a blank chart. You’ll even be able to save your own templates, globally or privately. This way if you have a foundation for a chart you want to reference or reuse regularly, you can save it and come back to it when needed.

We’re also working hard on our Shared Dashboard feature, coming in a few months’ time. This will initially enable you to share your Custom Charts dashboards with customers, directly in the Jira Service Management (JSM) portal. Currently you can only create charts on a Confluence page linked to the JSM portal and share them that way (so you’d need the separate Custom Charts for Confluence app). Shared Dashboards will allow you to skip this step and share Jira charts and reports directly through the portal.

In time you’ll be able to share your Custom Charts dashboards with non-Jira users anywhere. So you could share a live dashboard in an email to a stakeholder (instead of a static screenshot), or display it on a website such as your company intranet. You could, for example, display one on your intranet home screen to keep remote workers informed and motivated in lieu of a Jira wallboard in your office.