How to get a count of activity details and employee customer interactions in JSM

[#1]

Summary

Sometimes it becomes necessary for management to get a view of how many tickets have been actively worked on, in a particular week. This information may be needed in order to send a report to stakeholders with details like a count of issue activity and including a count of both customer and (internal) employee interactions that have happened on the ticket.

This helps managers to understand from the weekly report which tickets are active and which are inactive. This may be useful from an analytics perspective as well.

How to achieve this?

Right now, Jira does not have the feature available natively to include issue statistics/activity statistics and comments count as a column. This can be achieved by means of an automation rule (using Automation for Jira-A4J) which would count and account for all issue activity like comments, status transitions, field updates etc and update a custom field which can be used in the filter/report.

Solution:

This solution involves two automation rules and two custom fields of type Number.

In my instance I have created the two fields and named them as 'Comment Count' and 'Activity Count' in order to keep track of the number of comments (internal and external) and the issue updates/activity.

Then I created two automation rules as explained below:

Rule 1

Trigger: Issue commented
Action: Edit issue field -> Comment Count with the following smart value {{issue.comment.size}}

Refer screenshot below:

Rule 2

Trigger: Multiple issue events and select all the events 
Action: Edit issue field -> Activity Count with the following smart value {{#increment}} {{issue.Activity Count}} {{/}}

Refer screenshot below:

The automation rules need to be published and enabled.

Now, whenever an issue is created, the activity count would start with 1; Then any changes to issue fields/status transitions/assigns etc add to the activity count and when comments are added the comment count increases.

See below for an example of the rule working in my instance on a ticket SM-42:

Note: This automation rule would only account for the activity count and comment count for issues that are created after the rule is enabled.

These new custom fields can be exposed in the filters as seen below:

Now, we can create a filter for all open tickets created from the start of the week and set a subscription for it so that the filter results would be emailed to a group of people setup.

Information on creating a filter and subscriptions for the same can be found in the documentation below:

• Manage-filters

We can modify the columns that should be displayed in the filter to ensure that the relevant information is shown. This is explained in the documentation given below:

• Configure-the-default-issue-navigator/#Change-the-column-configuration-for-your-own-filters

Sample JQL that could be used:

created > startOfWeek() and project = <project name> 

Information on using JQL for advanced searching is given here:

• Jql-functions/#startOfWeek--

We can also associate the filter with a dashboard gadget like the issue statistics or pie chart gadget, however currently, one cannot setup a subscription for the dashboard.

We do have a feature request to track this given below:

• JRACLOUD-15260-Add ability to subscribe dashboards

Another way to get the activity count would be using API/web hooks to make a call to the Change Logs API as explained in the community article below:

• Count-Comments-and-Issue-History-for-Jira-Issues

Note: Using the API as specified in the article above would help to get a count of comments and activity for existing tickets as well.

[Vedant Kulkarni]

Interesting!!

[Paul Prata]

How do you grab the count x the person they made the comment? Looking to understand how many comments my team enters into a ticket.