A Primer on Asset Dashboards

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Introducing Dashboards for Atlassian Assets

Atlassian recently launched a new feature as part of their Assets app in the Dashboards functionality. This feature lets you create custom dashboards that help you visualize data relating to your assets.

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What can you visualize?

Asset Dashboards are flexible with how information can be displayed. The structure of a dashboard is based on rows that you then insert gadgets into. Rows can have up to four gadgets configured, all of which display data in a different format. Rows can have their height set to four different options as well, anywhere from small to extra large.

Types of Gadgets / Charts

Atlassian provide five different chart types you can select from:

1. Vertical Bar Chart
2. Horizontal Bar Chart
3. Donut Chart
4. Line Chart
5. Data Table

Creating a Dashboard

When crafting a dashboard, I find it best to start with the question "What question does this chart answer?". With this in mind, select one of the available charts, and then choose a chart metric. The chart type you select will determine what metric options you have available, with all being available via the data table option.

Once we've got a chart and metric selected, you'll next need to define the input data we will use. This comes in the form of selecting a Schema, and then one or more Object Types.

Once the data source is defined, we now need to configure the layout of our chart. The available options will largely depend on what chart you choose, but largely you'll want to select an axis or slice data source. These generally will be attributes related to the object types you have selected.

The final options will be filters you can apply to the data. Filters let you restrict the data based on predefined rules for any attribute that's associated with your source data. You can have up to five filters applied to a single chart, and these filters compound. 

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Built-in Dashboard

Atlassian provides one predefined dashboard, and it relates to ITSM teams utilizing Jira Service Management. This is largely because Atlassian is unaware of your organization's specific data structure, but has full control over the Services schema.

This built-in dashboard aims to provide insights on the services your teams may be providing, giving you an overview of total services broken down by type, as well as a a summary of software service tiers.

As with all dashboards, this pre-built dashboard supports customization, so you can enhance this to better meet your organization's needs.

And that's a primer on the new Dashboards feature! While still early days, it provides some useful insights into your data.

[Rune Rasmussen]

The new dashboard feature is an enormous step up from the old reports module.
I am genuinely happy that this improvement has been made.

But... It sure would be nice if the Data tables would keep their column sorting when you move your mouse away from it, and it sure as hell heck would be nice if User attributes would show the users name rather then their user ID.

How this has gone into GA with such bugs/shortcomings I will never understand, but on the other hand it is on brand for Atlassian and the way they release new features.