Jira Labels Report

[Colin Fong]

Our company labels our support issues to track what problems happen the most. We'd like to produce a report that includes:

- label counts by frequency

- segmented by quarter & year

I've read that labels might not be a good field to do this with. If so, are there other fields that work better?

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Colin Fong 

How does the team know and how stable is the list of "what problems happen the most"?  And when does the team associate a specific problem to an incident?  Knowing that information may help the community to offer you additional suggestions for your reporting need.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Colin Fong]

Hey Bill,

Good questions.

• What do you mean by stability?
• The team labels each and every support issue that we receive from our customers. Issues get the same label when we begin to the same root cause or exact symptoms. Basically when the same issue is reported from different customers.

We'd like to take a count of them to report the most frequently seen issues to our product management team so they can build features around the most high impact issues to ultimately reduce the number of support tickets we receive.

We currently report on these manually by taking exports of Jira filters and running analysis on on the data with spreadsheets and pivot tables. Ideally, we'd be able to have this reporting in Jira so that our product managers can read the data without us needing to run a report each time it's requested.

It would be best if they could see frequency of labels by quarter and year in order to determine the impact of different support problems.

-Colin

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi, Colin.

Thanks for that information!  When I asked about "stability" I wondered if you had a consistent list of symptom/impact areas you wanted to measure...or...if that list evolves over time.  From your description it seems to evolve, and so perhaps labels are better than components.  One challenge with labels that could impact your reporting is consistency, as it is easy to mis-type or have multiple versions of the same label meaning.

To see a time-series for such information you have a few options to try:

• You could use several JQL queries using relative dates (e.g. -2m, -1m, this month) and show gadgets on a dashboard for the window to show the labels, such as with the pie chart.  One challenge with this is inconsistency in display between the independent gadgets, like different colors on different gadgets for the same label value.
• You could investigate better reporting/gadgets from the marketplace which can display time-series information for labels, even as values evolve over time, within Jira
• You could export/push out the data for reporting in tools better capable of such types of reporting

[Colin Fong]

@Bill Sheboy Sorry for the long turnaround to reply. Our list evolves and you're correct on duplicates and multiple versions. In order to reduce this we do 2 things. We 1) review labels on a regular basis to combine duplicates and 2) have a naming convention for our labels being with a "product are prefix"_"then adjective suffix" so that when we type in the prefix, we get a recommendation of suffixes that hopefully reduce duplicates as well.

Thanks for the tips!

[Colin Fong]

We're able to produce a report like this by adding a filter for each label, but would like to create a report with all labels within a time period

[Dave Mathijs]

Hi @Colin Fong ,

Alternatives for labels are Components and custom fields. Both have their benefits and drawbacks.

Have a look at this nice article from jexo for more info: 101 guide to Jira components and how to manage them the easier way

Good luck and thanks for accepting this answer if it helps you.