Understanding Jira's Time to Resolution and Time to First response

Question

Could someone give me the lowdown or article on getting ones head around the Time to resolution raw data that is in Jira?

We have these fields:

Time_to_resolution_Actual_MS: (which is in milliseconds and has some negative numbers such as -105,987,136.00)

Time_to_resolution: which shows text as 41h 43m or -29h 26m (again negative numbers)

Time_to_resolution_Actual: as 77h 26m which actually makes sense, but you can't sum that column because it's a text field

Time_to_resolution_Actual_Timestamp: such as 77:26, which again you can't sum or average.

How are some of these values negative? Is the ticket resolved before it's even started or existed?

The only field that makes sense is Time_to_resolution_Actual but because it's a text field you can't SUM or Average it against an Axis

Surely there is a time to resolution value somewhere that I can use to Sum or Average how long tickets took to resolve within a specific grouping.

Time to resolution being the time between the ticket first being opened to when it was last marked as resolved.

Same issue for Time_to_first_response

NB: I'm bringing this raw data into PowerBI so I'm not interested in third party add-ons.

Thank you

Marc Isikoff_o8qjap · Answer

By far, the easiest way to track time for SLAs, is to create custom date/time fields for your project, and automate when an SLA action occurs (breach, resolved, commented) you give {{now}} to that field, essentially captures as a date/time field when they occured.

The reporting angle is a little difficult because custom field resolved time less created time is just wall time. You will need to factor your business hours into that to get true time worked.

But for breaches this is gold; you can accurately give the date and time a breach happened, not just everbreached().

paul_creedy · Answer

Thank you for confirming Sam

It does seem like there is no native 'true' time to resolution or time to first reply, and those values are actually SLA related.  I was confusing the built-in values with my own expectations of what they meant.

Both time to resolution and time to first reply are important metrics for a service desk to measure response times, particularly when grouped against different types of issues (or agents).  I'm very surprised that JIRA doesn't have those baked in.

Scanning other community posts, I can see that I'm not the only one with the same confusion.  Wonder how many users are using that metric incorrectly and made the same assumption that I did.

For future readers of this post:

The first reply and time of resolution in Jira is in reference to the SLA's.  This is why you get negative numbers. They do not mean the traditional 'first reply time', 'full resolution time' that one would expect if following ITSM metrics.

If you want stats with the traditional meaning you have to calculate it yourself.

You get more flexibility by using a PowerBI Addon exporter (there's a few of them in the market place), and then using the free PowerBI Desktop app to consume that feed for your statistics.

Here are the custom column fields I've ended up with (so far):

c_FirstReplyHours = DATEDIFF(Issues[Created].[Date],Issues[Status_Changed_Date].[Date],HOUR)c_FirstReplyDays = DATEDIFF(Issues[Created].[Date],Issues[Status_Changed_Date].[Date],DAY)c_WaitToResolutionDays = DATEDIFF(Issues[Created].[Date],Issues[Resolved].[Date],DAY)c_WaitToResolutionHours = DATEDIFF(Issues[Created].[Date],Issues[Resolved].[Date],HOUR)This allows you to produce a graph around month and priority to show how the agents are 1st lining the tickets based on priority.  For example, you would expect agents to react quicker responding to higher priority tickets than to lower priority tickets.  Median is used in preference to Average so as to exclude those random long running tickets that you always get in a busy system.Sample:
Hope this helps future readers.

Samuel Gatica _ServiceRocket_ · Answer

Hi @paul_creedy

The Time to Resolution and Time to First Response are fields used by SLA and JSM functionality only.

Unfortunately, Jira does not have a native field that calculates the Time to Resolution.

If you use boards, you can see how long a certain issue is in that column. You need to go to your board settings > card layout > days in the column.

Alternatively, you can add a new custom field 'Time to resolution' that you fill in automatically when you resolve an issue. You can compute the days from creation till resolved with smart values {{now.diff(issue.created).days}}.

Hope this helps

Best regards

Sam