In the age of IT technology, information rules the world.

It comes from various sources, including Jira, a project management platform popular among development teams.

Today, however, gathering information is not enough. You need to process it quickly, analyse it, and transform it into a visually acceptable form to discuss it with your team and use it in your decision-making process. Many business intelligence solutions today, such as Power BI and Tableau, cover these needs.

Most IT teams use some form of BI tools to stay informed and have up-to-date data. However, when they start thinking about incorporating Jira as a source of data to be processed and included in the decision-making process, they face a problem. The Jira Cloud solution offers data export by default, although it is pretty challenging to set up and customise. The default content package uses basic authentication to connect to the JIRA Rest API. Although it looks simple, this option requires the user to have additional Jira admin skills in most cases.

The Server and Data Center versions do not allow you to import data from Jira into Power BI, so you have to use special connectors.

This blog post will explain how to export your data from Jira to Microsoft Power BI using the Power BI Connector for JIRA.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is an analytics tool for businesses that :

• provides information to enable instant “smart” decisions,
• converts files into spreadsheets and charts and shares them with team members,
• visually searches and views data “on-site” and in the cloud in a single view,
• collaborates and exchanges customised dashboards and collaboration reports,
• improves the level of the company through integrated management.

How do you connect Jira to Power BI?

First, you need to create a data source. Click on Power BI on the main bar. Then click Create a Data Source:

Choose a connector name (name and description), and then select the data fields you want to export.

When you are finished, save.

The application will generate a link to your data source, save it and navigate to the Microsoft Power BI desktop.

Click Get Data (1), select OData Feed (2), and paste the generated data feed URL. Confirm the selection.

The last part is to select the tables and click on load. It may take a while.

That’s it. You’ve just finished importing data from JIRA into Microsoft Power BI, and now you can create beautiful dashboards and explore and analyse the data.

If you use Tableau BI, the process with Tableau Connector for Jira will be similar.

Prepared in cooperation with our partner company, Alpha Serve

If you need help from experts with the implementation or setup or advice on how to use it most efficiently in your company, do not hesitate to contact us

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