Confluence Dashboards - why isn't there a consistent way to refresh gadgets?
Asked by Randy O_Neal:

I have created many dashboards in both Jira Cloud and Confluence Cloud. I have come to the conclusion Jira dashboards may be more complete in that each gadget in the Jira dashboard has a consistent container-level refresh control... just to the right of the Minimize/Maximize control. Confluence has neither of these.

In various circumstances, both of these controls seem to have equal importance and represent equal delta functionality between Confluence and Jira dashboards. The inability to expand/minimize content, as well as being able to refresh a single gadget in a consistent manner tends to lead me to leverage identical dashboards in both Jira and Confluence, and to use them as best fits the occasion; I find the need for both... and I wish I could settle on a single solution, namely Confluence.

Confluence has refresh controls in some - but not all - of their gadgets, and the controls are inconsistent. Furthermore, Confluence does not support expanding/minimizing the gadgets either (or at least I've not discovered that capability so far). I think I understand why, but comparing the capabilities of both dashboards leave both wanting in various circumstances; for example, there's no way currently to imbed a Confluence document within a Jira dashboard.**\*** This is surprising missing functionality, and it's probably the #1 driver for me to create dashboards in Confluence rather than Jira.

Am I missing something here? Does anyone know of any plans to bring both dashboard platforms up to feature/function parity? Or am I missing some key knowledge regarding dashboard functionality?

**\*** There *is* a way to perform some AWS shenanigans to get Confluence page contents to be displayed within a Jira dashboard... but - quite frankly - such feats of magic should not be required; there should be a simple prescribed method of imbedding Confluence pages in Jira dashboards, but at present there isn't, unless something has changed recently.


Answers:
author: Aron Gombas _Midori_
body: [@Randy O_Neal](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4270808) As Nic mentioned there is no actual "dashboard" feature in Confluence Cloud.

We are working on a dashboard experience in our [Better Content Archiving for Confluence Cloud](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/123/better-content-archiving-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) app, offering space/content/user/status report for the whole site:

![Confluence-site-dashboard.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/313756i44C5429BDB0554B0/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Confluence-site-dashboard.png")

...and for any individual space:

![Confluencespace-dashboard.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/313755iE81D1D1C5C4825AD/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Confluencespace-dashboard.png")

Try if these help you get the insights you are looking for. It works with Free, Standard and Premium plans with no difference.

*(Discl. it is a paid and supported app developed by our team. Free for 10 users!)*


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Confluence doesn't do dashboards at all!

What you are talking about is Confluence pages being used as dashboards. It's not what Confluence was built for, but it's certainly not a bad use for it, and a lot of people do this.

It would be great to be able to be able to create pages as dashboards, I think it would be a great addition to Confluence - I mean have a dedicated content type for them (like it currently has pages and blogs, which work differently)


author: Lucy Dilts
body: We are actually moving away from Jira to more comprehensive tools like Azure that support the whole pipeline.

I have been using JIRA since the early grasshopper days and it will be sad to say goodbye, but it is just not a consistent or efficient tool anymore.


Tags: confluence-cloud

jira-cloud