Spectra Is Live: Jira Dashboards You Can Actually Explore

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Jira Dashboards You Can Actually Explore

Every team has the ritual. Someone asks “how's it going?”, someone opens Jira, stares at a static pie chart for four seconds, and then — export to CSV, pivot table, screenshot into a slide. Jira has the data. Getting an answer out of it is the part that costs you an afternoon.

We built Spectra to kill that ritual.  Spectra 

Every chart is a filter

The core idea is one you know from proper BI tools but never get inside Jira: linked brushing. Click a bar, a pie slice, or a pivot cell, and every other widget on the dashboard refilters to your selection. Multi-select to drill deeper; your selections show up as chips; one click clears them.

“Of the blocked work, who owns it and how long has it been sitting?” is three clicks. No JQL, no controller gadget, no export.

Chart the metrics Jira doesn't store

Most dashboard gadgets can only chart fields that already exist on the issue. But the questions that actually matter — how long did this take? where does work get stuck? how old is our WIP? — live in the change history, not in fields.

Spectra replays each issue's history and exposes cycle time, time-in-status, WIP aging, SLA state, and reopen count as first-class chart axes. Group by them, bucket them, trend them. Median and p85 KPIs, control charts with percentile lines, cumulative flow diagrams reconstructed from history — the flow metrics teams actually ask for, with no formula language. If you've ever bounced off MDX in a Jira BI tool, that last part is the point.

From question to chart in seconds

Fifteen-plus chart types — bar, line, stacked area, control chart, KPI, gauge, pivot, activity calendar, and a dependency matrix no other gadget offers. Point any widget at a project, an agile board (velocity and burndown come from there), a saved filter, or raw JQL with autocomplete. Cross-project reporting is just a saved filter that spans projects.

Or skip the building: nine one-click templates cover the dashboards every team ends up making — team overview, cycle time & flow, time-in-status & WIP, SLA & aging, flow history, velocity & burndown, epics & story points, components & teams, and dependencies & blockers.

It lives where your team already looks

Spectra is both a full-page app (Apps → Spectra) and a native gadget for regular Jira dashboards — and gadgets on the same dashboard cross-filter each other. Your stakeholders don't have to learn a new tool; the dashboard they already open just got interactive.

Forge-native, like everything we build

Spectra is pure Atlassian Forge: no external servers, no data egress, nothing copied to a third-party cloud. Your issues, change history, and dashboards stay inside Atlassian's infrastructure — which for security-conscious teams is a real difference from BI apps that sync your Jira data out to their servers. 

Aggressive pricing, on purpose

Comparable Jira dashboard and BI apps run $1–3 per user per month. Spectra is free for up to 10 users, then $0.50/user, dropping to $0.25 at scale — every feature at every tier, no add-ons. We'd rather be the obvious choice than the expensive one.

Try it

Install Spectra  from the Atlassian Marketplace, pick a template, point it at your project, and you'll have your first cross-filterable dashboard in about five minutes. The docs cover everything else.

Enjoy!
Bartek from Orbiscend Team
(Spectra app provider)