How to Create Jira Dashboard in Under 10 minutes!
Beginner’s Guide: Create a Jira Dashboard in 10 Minutes
Managing projects in Jira can become overwhelming without a clear, visual way to track progress, priorities, and workloads. That’s where Jira dashboards come in. Dashboards serve as customizable control panels that give you and your team a centralized view of project data, all driven by filters and powered by gadgets. Whether you’re tracking sprint velocity, monitoring issue statuses, or surfacing critical bugs, dashboards help transform raw data into meaningful insights.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to create a dashboard, add useful gadgets, customize layouts, and share dashboards with your team. We’ll walk you through key tools like the Pie Chart gadget for visualizing issue distribution, the Filter Results gadget for displaying lists of issues, and cover the deprecated Roadmap gadget to highlight changes in Jira’s evolving feature set. You’ll also learn how to handle common issues, especially around permissions, which can prevent teammates from accessing shared dashboards or filters.
Whether you’re a Jira beginner or looking to improve team transparency, this guide provides the practical steps and context you need to make dashboards a powerful part of your project management toolkit. By the end, you’ll be able to build and share dashboards that keep your entire team aligned and informed.
- Beginner’s Guide: Create a Jira Dashboard in 10 Minutes
- A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Jira Dashboard
A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Jira Dashboard
1. Creating a Dashboard
Creating a dashboard in Jira is a quick process that starts by navigating to Dashboards > Create Dashboard. From there, give your dashboard a descriptive name that reflects its purpose, such as Development Team Dashboard, and click Save.
Before diving into customization, it’s a good idea to define the purpose of your dashboard. Understanding what information you want to present will guide your layout and the types of gadgets you include, ensuring the dashboard is both useful and relevant.
2. Adding Gadgets
Gadgets are the essential components of a Jira dashboard. They are used to display and visualize data from filters you’ve created. By choosing the right gadgets, you can turn raw issue data into meaningful insights.
The Pie Chart gadget is designed to visualize issue data based on a selected field. A common use case is displaying issues grouped by status (e.g., “To Do”, “In Progress”, “Done”). To add it, click Add Gadget > Pie Chart, select a filter that pulls in the relevant issues (e.g., from a specific project), choose the field you want to visualize—such as Status—and click Save. The resulting chart offers a quick visual snapshot of your team’s workload or project progress.
The Filter Results gadget displays a list of issues based on a saved filter in a tabular format. This is particularly helpful when you want to display detailed issue data. To use it, add the gadget to your dashboard and select a saved filter (e.g., Growth Stories). Then, choose which columns you’d like to display, such as Key, Summary, or Assignee. After saving, the gadget will show the list of issues in real time, and you can rearrange it to fit the layout.
The Roadmap gadget was used to show high-level project plans in a visual timeline format. However, Atlassian is phasing out this feature, and it has been replaced by the more modern Timeline view. While you may still see the gadget in some versions of Jira, it’s recommended to transition to the newer tools for future compatibility.
3. Customizing Dashboards
Once gadgets are added, you can tailor your dashboard layout to suit your preferences. Gadgets can be rearranged using drag-and-drop, and the overall layout can be adjusted from a two-column to a three-column setup (or other configurations). Additionally, each gadget can be individually configured—for example, by choosing which fields to show in a filter results table—making the dashboard both functional and easy to navigate.
4. Sharing Dashboards
To collaborate effectively, dashboards must be shared with the appropriate team members. Click on the three dots > Rename or Share and set View and Edit permissions. You can choose to make the dashboard visible to everyone in your organization or limit access to specific roles or projects. It’s important to explicitly add permissions before saving; otherwise, team members may not be able to access the dashboard at all.
5. Common Issues and Fixes
A common issue occurs when a user can see the dashboard layout but not the data within the gadgets. This typically happens when the filters used in gadgets are private.
To fix this, navigate to Filters > Manage Filters, select the relevant filter, and open the filter details. Update the filter’s permissions so it’s visible to the same group or organization that has access to the dashboard. Once saved, the gadgets that rely on that filter should display properly for all users.
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Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
