Why date based data differs between Dashboard Hub and Jira?

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Sometimes, when we try to filter data based in a date range, we receive different results when we apply a filter or JQL query directly in Jira or when we apply the same filter or JQL query in a Dashboard Hub gadget.

This is related to your profile’s timezone configuration that, at the end, can be affected by two different configuration parameters: Timezone configuration and timezone visibility.

Timezone configuration and timezone visibility in Jira

Navigate to your Atlassian’s account configuration using this link and click on the “Account preferences” option at the top of the page, there, check your timezone settings. If you haven’t configured it, it’s probably set to the system’s timezone of your instance.

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The other parameter that you should take into account is your timezone visibility, to check that configuration option, click on the “Profile and visibility” option also at the top of the same page and scroll down until you find the “Local time” option.

As you can see you have different options to set the visibility for this value.

Why timezone configuration can affect the data in my dashboards

In every information system when it comes to deal with date and time data, we store it using a reference timezone, usually by default is UTC timezone. When we need to show that date to a user we “translate” it to the user’s timezone so it can be meaningful from the user’s perspective.

For example, if you are located at Arizona in USA, your timezone will be -7 hours regarding UTC time.

If you modify a Jira issue to set a date value to the 31th of December of 2023 at 19:00 hours using your Arizona timezone, the value that will be stored will be 1st of January of 2024 at 2:00 am.

If you filter your data taking into account date ranges you should notice that the limits of the range will be different between different timezones. In the previous example the same issue could appear in different years depending on the timezone applied.

Different ways to retrieve data from Dashboard Hub

In Dashboard Hub we have different means to access the data from different instances, some of this means can be affected in different ways by this timezone discrepancy.

Our connector based datasources relies on Jira’s instance default timezone when the user’s setup includes visibility restrictions for its local time visibility.

In the previous image we are showing the result of the exact same filter, the API Token based datasource is applying the user’s timezone preferences while the Connector based datasource only can access the data based on the source instance timezone configuration.

Depending of the data format that you are interested in, you can switch between different types of datasources or even review your timezone settings.

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