In this post, we will get you up to speed with the basics of how to load your data from JIRA to Power BI so that you can get an instant dashboard to analyze and explore your data. You will go through the main steps and by the end, you should have a strong foundation on how to set up a working connection between your JIRA instance and Power BI.
What is JIRA?
Image Source: Atlassian
JIRA is a tool developed by Atlassian, an Australian company. It is one of the most fully-featured, flexible, and agile project and team management tools available in the market. It is widely used by Software and Business teams to track day-to-day activities like:
- Project management
- Issue tracking
- Bug tracking
Engaging Workflow is a highlight of Jira. Jira also offers a 360-degree perspective of your processes, which is really useful. This guarantees that everyone on the team is aware of the procedures and that none are forgotten. Team members can chat, share ideas, attach critical documents, and receive frequent updates on topics that interest them.
By managing projects using JIRA, you get; better visibility, less downtime between tasks, better prioritization, improved teamwork and more predictability in IT support, operations, marketing, accounting, and the software delivery process.
What is Power BI?
Image Source: www.freelogovectors.net
An essential tool in any analytics toolkit is a data visualization tool. If you use JIRA to manage your projects, you may want to analyze your JIRA data (projects, sprints, issues, stories, etc.) in Power BI. While there are many different options, Power BI is a market leader in this space.
The Power BI business intelligence solution unifies data from disparate sources to create interactive, immersive, dashboards and reports, providing actionable insights and driving business results.
With Power BI, you can connect to many of the services you use to run your business, such as JIRA, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Sage, QuickBooks, Zendesk, etc. to get customized reports and dashboards built on top of your data from these services.
Why Combine Power BI and Jira in the First Place?
1) Power BI as a Standard of Business Intelligence Software
Business Intelligence also refers to a set of tools that enable quick, easy-to-understand access to data-driven insights about an organization’s current situation. To offer users with detailed Business Intelligence, BI tools access and analyze data sets and show analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts, and maps. Microsoft’s Power BI is probably one of the most popular BI solutions.
2) Jira to Power BI: Important Data Source for Business Analytics
A Graphic Dashboard is a typical component of all agile solutions that shows how the team is developing and accomplishing its objectives.
Jira enables project managers to examine the information on the dashboard, focus on key areas, and guarantee that customer project requirements are met according to the agreed-upon timeline. Managers can assess performance over time with the reporting, which includes information on current sprints.
3) Why do Jira to Power BI Data Transfer?
For instance, Jira keeps track of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (such as the number of open problems, project velocity, and the number of hours utilized for each project) so that resource planning decisions may be made intelligently. Managers use historical data to delve down into the data and find areas for improvement.
Managers can then use Power BI to combine data from various sources. For example, a web API extracts data from a cloud-based problem tracking system. The information from this database is then combined with data from an on-premise database used in an internal time-keeping system.
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How to Connect JIRA to Power BI?
JIRA provides a REST API that allows data extraction. In this post, you will be pulling data from JIRA into Power BI using the JIRA content pack developed for Power BI. The content pack stores a snapshot of the configuration data of both the data source and the target, therefore enabling Power BI users to quickly connect to the services they use to run their businesses so that they can generate new insights into their data.
Prerequisites
- Get Power BI Desktop.
- A Power BI Pro account.
- An Atlassian account that you can use to log in to JIRA.
Steps to Move Data from JIRA to Power BI
Step 1: Generate an API Token
You will need an API token for the account you will be using to connect the Jira Power BI Content Pack. Navigate to this link https://id.atlassian.com/manage/api-tokens and click on Create API Token. Give your API a meaningful name.
Image Source: www.community.atlassian.com/t5
Save the generated API token in a safe and secure place as we are going to use it later.
Step 2: Download and Install the JIRA Content Pack
There used to be a Power BI content pack for JIRA to perform this function. However, this app is no longer available on the Power BI app marketplace. Nonetheless, you can download the .pbit version to use in Power BI Desktop.
To install the template file, directly double-click on the .pbit file you just downloaded. The content pack will open in a new Power BI Desktop file.
When the installation is complete, the new app appears on the Apps page.
Step 3: Add the API Token to the Jira Power BI Content Pack
In the Power BI dashboard:
- Select Apps in the nav pane.
- Select JIRA from the list of available apps.
- Opening the app prompts you to set your JIRA URL, for example, https://company.atlassian.net
- Next, you need to provide authentication credentials.
- Use your email address as your username and the new API Token as your password.
Once the connection has been completed, Power BI will automatically create a workspace with a dashboard and a set of Power BI reports that automatically show your data and provide visual insights about your business with data from JIRA.
Image Source: www.powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog
The JIRA content pack shows you real-time, actionable data about your project, e.g. the progress rate, the relative workload for each assignee and a summary of your bugs and issues grouped by status and assignee. Clicking on any of the dashboard tiles will open the JIRA content pack report, where you can interact and explore your data in Power BI.
Image Source: www.idalko.com/power-bi-jira
After the initial connection, the dashboard and reports will continue to update daily. You can control the update schedule by selecting the dataset, and configuring it to refresh at the exact times you choose. You can also customize your dashboards and reports.
Limitations of this Approach
There are a few limitations of manually transferring data from Jira to Power BI.
- There is no documentation or support provided for this app.
- The connection has a 100 records limitation that occurs on the JIRA side since the JIRA content pack in Power BI Service relies on JIRA API.
- The app is prone to data-volume-related problems. Accessing a large JIRA dataset using a Power BI report based on this app will cause the app to fail.
- Dataset refresh takes a long time.
- It takes a long time to process data even if you don’t load all of the fields into your report.
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Next Steps
- Share and collaborate on interactive data visualizations using Power BI Pro for self-service analytics.
- Distribute the app to your colleagues.
- Questions? Try asking the Power BI Community.
Use Cases for Jira to Power Bi Data Transfer
Companies can now employ Data Analysis of business data from Jira to Power BI to execute better strategies in general. IT personnel can remain ahead of the curve with Historical, Present, and Predicted perspectives of business processes since Jira data can be used for Analysis in BI tools.
Let’s look over a few popular use cases where Jira to Power BI data transfer benefits can be implemented.
1) Managing Multiple Projects
Managing many projects necessitates keeping track of a variety of variables at once: the number of projects in progress, each project’s stage, a project’s status in terms of on-time completion, the top five delayed issues, and so on.
By implementing Jira to Power BI data transfer, Power BI dashboards provide managers with complete project information at a glance. Such a bird’s-eye view helps them to keep a close eye on the project’s status and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) at a high level and respond promptly to any possible problems.
2) Remote Support Team
Managing a remote support team becomes a lot easier by implementing Jira to Power Bi data transfer and setting up a work Dashboard. There are a plethora of software tools available to assist managers in setting priorities. Some of these technologies are intended to track various types of User Assistance, such as a variety of Service Requests/Tickets and Ticket Categories.
Oversight Tracking provides additional information on the Average Time to close a ticket and the percentage of tickets that are closed on time. As a result, the support crew is more centrally supervised, but it is still flexible enough to allow for as much creative flexibility as feasible. This is useful for identifying recurring issues and trends in occurrences.
3) Managing Resources for Software Development
Another use of Jira to Power BI data transfer can be in managing resources for Software Development. BI tools continue to pose one of the most critical problems in software development: whether or not to embrace the concept of Agile Development, which encourages developers to be flexible and innovative in delivering exactly what the user requires.
Managers that enforce highly defined plans with fixed responsibilities and inflexible schedules irritate programmers, forcing them into tight boxes. The pressure of Estimated Time vs. Actual Execution time vs. Time Remaining, by default, leaves little leeway for programmers to use their intuitive and improvisational ways of communicating.
Again, such technologies do not enforce rigid schedules or tasks; instead, they just make everyone’s job easier. Many organizations are using actively Jira to Power Bi data transfer for this purpose.
Conclusion
In this blog post, you have learned how to use the JIRA content pack developed for Power BI to load data. Though this will be useful to analyze your JIRA data, to make important strategic decisions, it is important to look at data from different applications, databases, etc.
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Talha is a Software Developer with over eight years of experience in the field. He is currently driving advancements in data integration at Hevo Data, where he has been instrumental in shaping a cutting-edge data integration platform for the past four years. Prior to this, he spent 4 years at Flipkart, where he played a key role in projects related to their data integration capabilities. Talha loves to explain complex information related to data engineering to his peers through writing. He has written many blogs related to data integration, data management aspects, and key challenges data practitioners face.
