JIRA Cloud - How to count Comments in time range?

[Filippo Barsotti]

Hello,

Do you know how it is possible to count the number of Comments across all Issues, in a given time range?
Many thanks.
Best,
Filippo

[Earl McCutcheon]

Hello @Filippo Barsotti ,

A portion of this request could be solved via add-ons, and I am aware of 2 add-ons that are capable of generating a global count of comments on issues which you could take a look at:

• Comment Custom Fields for Jira with a functionality of a Count field described here.
• Scriptrunner also has a similar functionality as described here.

However, in both of these cases the plugins are updating a custom field with the current count of the issues and I was not able to find a mention of a historical element to see what the comment count was during a certain time range, The Comment Custom Field app does appear to have the ability to base a JQL query off the timestamp of the last comment but no mention of dealing with comments during a time range, I would recomend reaching out to the vendors via the contact info on the marketplace listings above to see if they do have an existing solution for your use case already built in.

Possible workaround:

Changes to the issues field value data is stored is in the issue history tab of each issue, so individually you can expand the history tab and see what the value was at certain timestamps as one option to review the history items on the issue. 

An additional option here that would require a bit of testing and some custom scripting is to use those count fields noted above in combination with the API and you could leverage the API of the desired issue or a set of issues and expand the change history to see the contents of the issue history tab returned as a JSON text value and showing what the value of that field was set to with timestamps in the output, then script something to calculate tha values returned to get the desired report on comment updates.

Check out the following Community Post that gives some examples on calling the change-log on a different use case:

• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Issue-history-through-REST-API/qaq-p/503830

But the basics of the call would be to do a call to the endpoint:

• GET /rest/api/3/issue/{issueIdOrKey}?expand=changelog

And full details on the REST API can be found in the Jira Developer documentation at the following link to get you started if this is something you would like to follow up on:

• https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/jira/platform/rest/v3/

Regards,
Earl

[Filippo Barsotti]

Thanks Earl for the reply.

Very kind to explore the topic and go into details.

I hope in the future there can be an easy way to have this sort of report. Reason: explaining internally the value of JIRA through a KPI that shows how many email were 'saved' and captured in the platform.

Cheers,

Filippo