How to Create a Weekly Update Digest/Dashboard in Jira?

Hi @jason.roberts ,

I've been exactly in the same boat. I used my app for that - Multi-team Scrum Metrics & Retrospectives.

You can select any period (active sprints supported), any metric (constructed via JQL) and any column to present.

Best regards,
Alexey

Hi @jason.roberts 

Welcome to the community !!

If you would be interested in a mktplace app, try out the one we have developed.

Hey @jason.roberts!

Native Jira filters and gadgets don't handle worklog and comment filtering by date range well — they either show everything or nothing useful for digest-style reporting.

For the worklog part, JetTime (a third-party Jira app) can help — you can generate timesheet reports filtered by date range (e.g., last 7 or 14 days) showing Issue Key, Assignee, and all worklogs from that period. You can group by user or project and export as PDF or Excel for leadership.

For recent comments, you'd still need a separate solution, unfortunately.

JetTime features:

• Time tracking & timesheets with improved Log Work UI and timers
• Reports filtered by date range, user, or project
• Cost tracking with custom financial fields
• Custom metrics (mileage, materials, activity types, etc.)
• PDF & Excel export for reports
• Runs fully on Atlassian infrastructure, so data stays inside Atlassian Cloud

👉 JetTime on the Atlassian Marketplace
— Anton, JetTime founder

The native path that gets you closest without an app is a scheduled automation rule:

Trigger: Scheduled (e.g. a weekly cron). Action: Lookup issues with JQL like project = ABC AND updated >= -7d ORDER BY priority DESC. Then build the digest in a Send email / Send Slack/Teams message / Create Confluence page action, iterating the lookup results with a smart-value table — key, summary, assignee, priority all come out cleanly:
{{#lookupIssues}}{{key}} — {{summary}} ({{assignee.displayName}}, {{priority.name}}){{/}}

Two honest limitations to plan around:

1. Worklog and comment text are where native hits friction. You can reach {{issue.comments.last.body}}per issue, but pulling the last 1–14 days of comments/worklog across many issues inside one rule gets fiddly and can bump the monthly execution limits on larger boards. If that recent-activity narrative is the core of what leadership reads, that's the point where a small script against the REST API (search + changelog + comments endpoints) or a reporting app starts to earn its keep.
2. A dashboard (Filter Results gadget on the same JQL) is great for an at-a-glance view but can't natively schedule-email itself and won't render comment/worklog text well — so it complements the automation rule rather than replacing it.

If the leadership readers have Jira access, a Confluence page with the Jira Issues macro (JQL = updated in last 7 days) auto-refreshes and needs zero weekly effort — but it doesn't help if they're unlicensed.

Practical tip: decide the 3–4 things leadership actually acts on before automating. A short digest that's always reliable beats a full report that quietly breaks.

Hi Jason — the core issue is that a Jira dashboard always renders the live state of issues, so it can't give you a "what changed in the last 1–14 days" digest. You've got a few realistic paths:

Jira Automation (scheduled rule). This is the closest native fit for the email digest. A rule on a Scheduled trigger (e.g. weekly) with a JQL of updated >= -14d AND <your filter>, then a "Send email" action where you build the body from smart values over the matched issues — {{issue.key}}, {{issue.summary}}, {{issue.assignee.displayName}}, {{issue.priority.name}}, and {{issue.comments.last.body}} for the most recent comment. Two honest caveats: (1) Automation has monthly execution limits, so a large filtered set can burn through them — check your plan's limit; (2) work logs and a clean 14-day window of comments are the weak spot — smart values give you the latest comment cleanly but not an easy "all comments from the past 14 days," so you may have to accept "most recent" rather than a true window.

Dashboard for the live view. Keep a dashboard (Filter Results / Issue Statistics gadgets) for the current snapshot, and treat the emailed digest as the historical/"what moved" layer. They solve different halves of your problem.

Scheduled export + BI. If leadership genuinely needs point-in-time history (last week vs this week), Jira alone won't store that — a scheduled CSV/export into a BI tool, as Marc noted, is the durable answer.

If you want, share how many issues your filter typically returns and I can help you size whether the Automation route stays under your execution limit.

Hi Jason,

I would separate this into two problems:

1. Current state reporting: issue key, description, assignee, priority, and status.
2. Recent evidence: worklogs and comments from the last 1-14 days.

Native Jira dashboards are better at the first problem than the second. A saved filter plus the Filter Results gadget can show the current issue fields, but recent worklogs and recent comments are activity/history data. They usually do not roll up cleanly into an initiative/epic weekly digest without automation, export, BI, or a Marketplace app.

For leadership consumption, I would also be careful not to expose raw activity as the report. The useful weekly question is usually:

• What moved?
• What changed?
• What looks risky?
• What needs replanning?

If your team is moving work into Initiatives and Epics, I would structure the digest around the Initiative/Epic first, then use recent worklogs and comments as supporting evidence underneath each item. That keeps leadership focused on delivery movement instead of a long activity stream.

Disclosure: I am building Focus Flow, a Jira Marketplace app focused on weekly epic execution review. It is not a generic email digest tool, but this workflow is close to the reason we built an epic review screen: planned dates, worklog evidence, and issue drill-down in one place before writing the leadership update.

One question that may clarify the right solution: does leadership need to read the raw worklog/comment rows, or do they mainly need a defensible summary per Initiative/Epic with evidence available if challenged?

Hi @jason_roberts!

As a workaround, you can try to use Issue History for Jira (Work Item History) app provided by SaaSJet team. 

In your case, it helps solve exactly the limitation you’ve run into with Activity Stream.

In the app, you can use the filters (by space, JQL, etc.), set the needed date range (e.g., Last 14 days), add all the required fields (like Priority, Status, Log Work, etc.) using the Column section and receive such a report: 

In the app, you can use also a JQL filter like:  parent = EPIC-KEY that will show all tasks related to the specific Epic.

Once configured, you can save the view and reuse it, for example, for weekly reporting. There’s also an option to share or export the report (e.g., Excel) and send it to stakeholders.

Hope it wil be useful!

Hi @jason.roberts,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community.

Jira’s native dashboard gadgets are not able to provide this level of detail. You could try the Filter Results gadget to display a list of issues updated in the last 14 days, including fields such as Key, Summary, Description, Assignee, and Priority. However, you won’t be able to display worklogs or comments, and the data cannot be grouped by epic or initiative.

If you’re open to using a plugin from the Atlassian Marketplace, I would recommend trying the Worklog Reports & Timesheets gadget offered by our Great Gadgets app.

This gadget allows you to create all kind of statistics based on work logs from a specified time period (such as past 1-14 days), it can group data by epics or initiatives and can display worklogs. It works like pivot tables from Excel, allowing you to create complex stats, heatmaps or charts of various types. 

Here is an example for your user case, with a detailed view:

However, this gadget will not display the comments, only the worklogs.

You can also use it for more aggregated stats based on work-logs from past time intervals, like in these examples:

The app offers many other useful gadgets that can be useful for creating a weekly digest dashboard.

Hope this helps. if you have questions or need help with the configuration of our gadgets, feel free to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut

Hi, @jason.roberts