Why Atlassian Analytics? You Have Questions–We Have Answers!

In 2023 Atlassian announced the general availability of Atlassian Analytics at the Cloud Enterprise level. That means if you use Jira Software, Jira Service Management, or Confluence Cloud Enterprise, the solution is available to you right now at no additional cost–you simply need to set it up to get started. Pretty exciting right?

Since it’s still early days for the solution, and we’re getting some questions from clients, we thought it might be helpful to share our thoughts on it, the value it brings, and the problems it solves. 

Why Atlassian Analytics?

The big picture here is that your Atlassian stack has a ton of data in it about your business, but data isn’t insight, and it isn’t always actionable. And while the built-in reporting and dashboard functionality in your products is powerful and incredibly useful, sometimes you need to dive deeper by exploring data across products and instances, or by blending it with data from other sources. Atlassian Analytics provides this type of extensibility, plus the ability to visualize and manipulate data, without having to export the data into a third-party business intelligence tool or use a Marketplace app.

Beyond the power and utility of the solution itself, we can already see some advantages to being able to explore your data so granularly from within the Atlassian platform. For instance, you don’t have to build and maintain integrations with third-party business intelligence tools; you don’t have to pay licensing fees; and you get the benefits of Atlassian Enterprise-level security and data residency that your Atlassian Enterprise stack does. 

How does Atlassian Analytics work?

The high-level answer is that with Atlassian Analytics, all your data from across Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and OpsGenie is aggregated in Atlassian Data Lake (a data lake is a centralized repository for structured and unstructured data.) You can even pull in data from multiple instances and connect to several common third-party data sources and blend that data with your Atlassian data. 

Then, using Atlassian Analytics, you can connect to Data Lake and query the data in really granular ways to get deeper insights into your business. The results can be displayed visually in dashboards that feature different types of charts, and they update regularly, so the information is current. You can also manipulate it, and visualize it in dashboards in far more ways than you can with product-based reporting tools, share it with people using granular permissions, and even comment on it.

How can Atlassian Analytics be used?

Atlassian Analytics comes with 20 prebuilt dashboard templates that cover use cases related to specific products, as well as practices. There are dashboards for Jira Software, Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Opsgenie, as well as Jira Software flow metrics, value stream management, and asset and configuration management. (While all of these are valuable and interesting, we’re such big advocates of Atlassian Assets and have seen so many great use cases for it, that the asset and configuration management templates pique our interest!)

Some potential use cases include:

• DevOps - Get a better understanding of how work tied to delivering value to customers is progressing, and identify potential blockers across projects.

• ITSM - Get a better understanding of service desk requests, SLAs, and CSAT; incident and change request trends; and issues related to asset and configuration items.

• Knowledge Management - Get a better understanding of how content is being created, updated, and used.

Atlassian Analytics also includes low code/no code tools so you can build your own dashboards, but if you want to step things up a notch, you can use Visual SQL to build your own charts and pull them into dashboards. The possibilities with SQL queries are so endless that a good place to start might be to ask, “What do you need to know about your business that you don’t currently have insight into?”

Who should use Atlassian Analytics? 

Atlassian Analytics is only available at the Cloud Enterprise tier. Many Atlassian solutions come with out-of-the-box reporting and dashboard functionality that’s quite powerful and meets the needs of a lot of companies. However, if you’re at the Premium tier and thinking about making the leap to Enterprise, this may be the push you need. We also think it’s a good fit for companies who are on an Agile journey and/or looking to step up or streamline their business intelligence practices.

A few last thoughts.

As we said at the start of this blog post–it’s very early days for Atlassian Analytics. We’re looking forward to exploring it more in-depth ourselves, helping more clients implement it in their businesses to solve real-world problems, and following along as Atlassian continues to advance the solution. 

Atlassian Analytics Resources

If you want to know more about the nuts and bolts of how Atlassian Analytics works (no actual nuts and bolts involved) Atlassian has quite a bit more in-depth information on their site about it. To save you the step of rolling up your sleeves and looking for it, we’ve pulled together some of the most useful links for you.

• Atlassian Analytics General Availability Announcement
• Atlassian Analytics Overview
• Atlassian Analytics Resources
• Atlassian Analytics Data Sources
• Atlassian Analytics Dashboard Templates