Getting to Know Dashboards

Overview

A dashboard is your own metrics page: you decide which charts appear on it and with what settings. If reports are ready-made tools for one-off analysis, a dashboard is a permanent "instrument panel" that you assemble once and then open every day — at standups or process reviews.

How dashboards differ from reports:

• Several charts on one screen. No need to switch between reports — your key metrics are visible at a glance.
• Every widget is configured independently. One widget can show Lead Time for the whole board, the next one Throughput for bugs only, and a third one a comparison of two teams.
• Dashboards are saved. A configured dashboard doesn't go anywhere — it's waiting for you the next time you open JMP, and on paid plans it syncs through the cloud.
• Dashboards can be shared with colleagues via a link (see Sharing Dashboards).

Full-featured dashboards are an Expert plan capability. On the FREE and PRO plans, a demo mode is available: one dashboard with a few basic widgets to try the functionality in practice — see Dashboards and Plans for details.

Creating Your First Dashboard

1. Open the Dashboards section in the left sidebar.
2. Click the Create Dashboard button (or the "+" next to the section header in the sidebar).
3. Enter a dashboard name — the only required field — and confirm.

A new dashboard is created with one empty group called "Main". From there it's simple: click Add widget, pick the widgets you need, and configure them — see Dashboard Widgets for details.

Widget Groups

Widgets on a dashboard live in groups — horizontal sections with headers. Groups help keep things tidy once you have many widgets: for example, "Delivery Speed", "Process Health", "Team A / Team B".

What you can do with a group:

• Rename — click the group title and type a new one (up to 80 characters).
• Collapse/expand — handy for temporarily hiding sections you rarely need.
• Move up/down — the Move up / Move down buttons in the group menu.
• Add a widget — the Add widget button inside the group.
• Delete — with confirmation; the group's widgets are deleted along with it.

A new group is added with the Add Group button at the bottom of the dashboard. Widgets can be dragged between groups by the widget header.

Dashboard Date Range

The page header contains the date range picker — the global time range. By default, every widget on the dashboard follows it: change the range in the header and all charts rebuild for the new period.

At the same time, any widget can "detach" from the shared range and use its own — for example, so that a monthly chart and a quarterly chart sit side by side. Such a widget gets a custom-date badge in its header. See Dashboard Widgets for how to set this up.

Managing Dashboards

You can have several dashboards — for example, one per team or one per recurring meeting.

• Switching — click a dashboard name in the sidebar. The section shows up to 6 dashboards; if you have more, the View all link opens the full list.
• Favorites — the star to the left of the name pins a dashboard higher in the list.
• Renaming — the gear icon in the page header opens Dashboard Settings, where you can change the name.
• Deleting — the Delete dashboard button in the same settings dialog. Before deleting, JMP shows how many groups and widgets the dashboard contains and asks for confirmation — deletion cannot be undone.

Dashboards Belong to a Board

Every dashboard is tied to the Jira board it was created on. That makes sense: widgets are configured against a specific board's columns, swimlanes, and filters — on a different board, those settings wouldn't mean anything.

This has a few consequences:

• Open a different board, and you'll see that board's list of dashboards. If you haven't created anything on this board yet, the list will be empty — dashboards from other boards aren't gone, they're waiting for you on their own boards.
• You can't move or copy a dashboard to another board — for a new board, a dashboard has to be built from scratch.
• A sharing link also points to a dashboard on a specific board (see Sharing Dashboards).

Dashboards and Plans

Dashboards are an Expert plan feature; other plans get a demo mode for exploring the functionality:

The demo mode on FREE and PRO lets you build one dashboard with three basic widgets and see how everything works — but it is a preview, not a working tool. Premium widgets (Control Chart, Flow Efficiency, WIP Run Chart, Percentile Trend) are visible in the list but marked as available in the Expert plan.

If you go over the limit (for example, extra dashboards remain after an Expert trial ends), dashboards switch to read-only mode: everything stays visible, but editing is locked until you upgrade — your configured dashboards are not lost.

Saving and Synchronization

Working with dashboards requires signing in to your JiraMetrics.Pro account. On paid plans, dashboards sync through the cloud: configure a dashboard on your work computer and it will be available on your laptop after signing in to the same account. Synchronization happens automatically — there is no "Save" button to press.

What's Next

• Dashboard Widgets — widget types, display modes, settings, and datasets.
• Sharing Dashboards — how to share a dashboard with your team.