Say Goodbye to Status Meetings
Tags: agile, productivity
Published: 2021-02-27 21:29:03

##...and hello to Grafana

As a lead developer, I have often played the role of Scrum master on projects, managing tasks and spending lots of time in **Jira**.  Other roles such as Product Owner and Project Manager also spend a lot of time using Jira, trying to keep track of velocity, progress, status, blockers, estimates and well...if the project is going off the rails.  And of course we developers use it to create stories, track of our tasks, update progress, etc.

So following an agile process we end up having lots of status meetings where the project manager, product owner, and other stakeholders swoop in and want updates. Some times even "mid-sprint" updates. What? What the heck is that? So we stop all development, all progress and all get together say where we are at. This is not productive. There has to be a better way.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/9nx9h3yzwlvn09usuubj.jpg)

Enter [Grafana](https://grafana.com/). Wait what? [Grafana](https://grafana.com/)? Isn't that an open source observability platform? 

Yes...Exactly. You can monitor anything in [Grafana](https://grafana.com/), and now you can monitor Jira projects too.

The new [Jira Enterprise Plugin for Grafana](https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-jira-datasource) allows us to connect to Jira and get all of the observability features we love from Grafana, so we always know exactly what is happening in Jira at any time.

Ok, so tell me how this helps eliminate status meetings? 

Well, in [Grafana](https://grafana.com/) you can set up dashboards that will tell the story of where the project is, show velocity over time, show completion status of epics, show burndown charts, etc, etc. You can also set up alerts to send notifications if a project is heading in the wrong direction, velocity is dropping, story points are overloaded...whatever those managers want to know they can get from a dashboard.  Heck, they don't even have to go look at the dashboard, if the alerts are setup they can just sit back, relax, and know if something goes wrong they will be the first to know.

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8nm38dxjxeatiqydvx1k.png)

Is your team kicking ass? Great! Set up alerts and send it to those PMs and Product Owners. Even integrate those alerts into performance management systems! Yeah, alerts support webhooks and other integrations. Let Grafana toot your horn for you.

If you are familiar with Jira then you undoubtedly used JQL to search for issues at some point. Ever wish you could get SQL like features with JQL?  Like **Grouping**, **Joins**,and **Aggregating**. Well with Grafana transformations, now you can get SQL like capabilities, allowing you to tell stories that was previously not possible (without a bunch of custom coding anyway).

Ok, enough talk, show me a dashboard already!

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ywuzgoz4k9cjifltae6g.png)

Woah! This team is killing it in Sprint 2!

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/i66fraux0rlz3avoxddc.png)

How we doing over time?

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/k4g17j1v0td777q2i9qt.png)

If you are familiar with Grafana, you know you have a lot of flexibility to tell whatever story you want. Now go check out the [Jira plugin for Grafana](https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/grafana-jira-datasource)  and try it for yourself.