Backlog trend report in Jira Service Desk

[Paul Henry]

We recently migrated off of Zendesk to Jira Service Desk and are in the process of creating various reports. One report we would like to have is a backlog report that shows the trend of open tickets over time, say the past 30 days. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions of creating something like this?

Thanks.

[Claus]

Hi, I need the same - backlog per day to see the growth of the different issue types - any suggestion?

[Pavel Chaika]

hello, after few years of discussion - do we have any proposition from Atlassian how to build Backlog report, which contains the quantity of tickets which were opened, by not closed, per days / months ?

[Shubha Manju]

Hi there,

I would truly appreciate, if any one knows how to do the analysis on JIRA reports to find out the different types of ticket and their root causes.

[Andy Heinzer]

You won't find the term 'backlog' in Jira Service Desk.  I think this is primarily because it tends to be a focus of Jira Software and there is probably a desire to avoid the confusion of that term between these two Atlassian products.

But out of the box, there is a "Created vs Resolved" Service Desk report that you could use as a basis to see how many issue are being created in a Service Desk project.

In turn you could create your own Service Desk report to only show the created.  Check out

• Server: Setting up service desk reports
• Cloud: Setting up service desk reports

[Paul Henry]

Thanks Andrew, I paused before using the term 'backlog' for just that reason, but I struggled to come up with another as it pertains to service requests. I know about the "Created vs. Resolve" report, but that does not give me quite what I'm interested in (neither is a report of only Created issues). I'm specifically looking for a trend of open service requests to know if our 'backlog' of service requests is trending up or down. Any ideas on that? Thanks.

[Andy Heinzer]

Thanks for clarifying, but I actually do believe that the created vs resolved report can still be useful here.  Hear me out. 

You are correct that if looking at this report for 30 day period, that you won't see issues created events before 30 days ago.  I get it, you're wanting to see more details about issues that have been with your team before that time.

But what you can do here is to extend the time period to be more than that 30 day period to see how this project is managing the load.   You could use 'past quarter by day' or other longer intervals here.  If you see that the created values are consistently higher than your resolved values, then you certainly have a growing load.   Whereas should you have resolved value consistently outpacing created, then you are making headway against an existing backlog of issues.   In my view it is the relation between these two values on this chart over the course of that time that has to be seen in order to understand if you are making progress against the load of work.

Maybe that's not for you, if not, sorry for leading you down that approach.  As for other alternatives, have you looked into the possibility of using Jira Dashboard gadgets?  It is possible that one or more of these could help provide this information for you instead of relying on the project reports directly.  

You could use a couple of different gadgets that might help piece this information together.  For example the use of the Average Age Chart can be helpful to understand just how old most of the issues are in the project.  I can see how the average age would continue to grow upwards if you have a backlog that is unmanagably large.   There are also gadgets like recently created, or created v resolved.  All of these gadgets require you to choose an filter to use them.   In turn you can use some additional JQL filtering to customize the results that you want to see here.

If the Jira Service Desk reports are inadequate for your needs, I would look towards these dashboard gadgets next.  And if that is still insufficient, my next recommendation would probably be to take a closer look into some 3rd party plugins for reporting on Jira data, like eazybi.

[Manoshi Vasudevan]

I would like to see the Backlog trend as well. Is there a way to get that? Thanks.

[Sean Hederman]

Andy, coming to this. It is unacceptable that Jira does not have such a report or the ability to create such a report. We need to be on top of how many open tickets there are per day and how that is trending. None of your suggestions have panned out. There are no good third party reporting plugins for Jira cloud that do this.

The lack of this visibility is becoming critical for us, and we will likely migrate off Service Desk due to this one issue.

[Mārtiņš Vanags]

Hi,

Try using eazyBI for the Jira app where you can create a report to analyze issues by their historical statues over time periods if Backlog is one of the statuses you use in Jira SM projects.

See a report example on the public demo account.

https://eazybi.com/accounts/1000/cubes/Issues/reports/187032-cumulative-flow-diagram

You can filter the time periods on x-axis if you need to see just the last 30 days

Martins / eazyBI support

[Sean Hederman]

An absolute pain trying to get a backlog set up. Not recommended.

We're investigating a migration to a tool that actually supports backlog view out the box, i.e. every single other service desk system on earth.

[David Wilkes]

The Zendesk report for backlog volume is great.  We use it all the time as a key measure.  It's disappointing there isn't something similar in JIRA

[David Wilkes]

Have added the average age gadget to a dashboard which is great for seeing average age of unresolved tickets (I've set mine to show by month for the last 4 years).  If you expand that it shows a table with the backlog totals - so you can see the total count of unresolved tickets in a month.

I wonder if you could create a SLA that breaches as soon as a ticket is created, then a view of these tickets (so breached and not resolved).  The age gadget would then show the backlog count....not tried this!