FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

General

Can Dataplane report on issues created before it was installed or only on those issues created or modified after installation?

Arsenale Dataplane reports on the entire history of your JIRA instance, providing a comprehensive analysis of even those issues created or modified before Dataplane was installed.

When Dataplane is first installed, it automatically indexes your entire JIRA instance history including every issue creation, workflow transition, and field value change ever made. Once the initial index is complete, all subsequent changes in your JIRA instance are tracked by Dataplane in realtime.

So with Dataplane you get the same detailed insight into past project and team performance and metrics as you have going forward.

How current is the data I'm viewing in Dataplane reports?

After Arsenale Dataplane does an initial index, upon installation, of your JIRA instance history, all subsequent changes in your JIRA instance are then tracked by Dataplane in realtime.

So all Arsenale Dataplane reports reflect the most current state of your JIRA issues. There is no delay between JIRA issue changes and those changes being reflected in Dataplane reports, whether those reports are viewed within Dataplane, on JIRA dashboards, or in Confluence via a Dataplane gadget.

Will Arsenale Dataplane modify any of my JIRA project or issue data?

No. Dataplane does not modify your JIRA data in any way.

All of your JIRA project, issue, configuration and other JIRA application data is treated as read-only by Arsenale Dataplane. For its performance-optimized reporting and storing of saved reports and user-specific settings, Dataplane creates and maintains its own, separate database tables within the JIRA database.

Is Dataplane subject to the same 1000 issue export limit as the JIRA Issue Navigator?

No. Dataplane works completely independent of the JIRA Issue Navigator and is not subject to this limitation.

If you have not yet run into this limitation in the JIRA Issue Navigator, it refers to trying to do an Excel export of the results of a JIRA search and being limited to a maximum of 1000 issues (rows) that can be exported at any one time. This can make it difficult to pull comprehensive JIRA data into Excel for additional analysis. The limit built into the JIRA Issue Navigator is due to potential performance and memory issues with larger exports. You may increase this limit via a JIRA configuration parameter but should carefully monitor instance performance and memory usage in making any changes. Any changes made to JIRA's export limit is independent of Arsenale Dataplane and has no effect on your export of issues from Dataplane.

With Dataplane you can easily run reports on and export results containing tens of thousands of issues. Dataplane's Issues Table Report is an excellent substitute for viewing and exporting issues from the JIRA Issue Navigator.

Dataplane's report queries are run directly against the JIRA database rather than JIRA's internal issue cache. So that Dataplane's database queries are not completely unbounded in result size, Dataplane places a soft limit on database query results of 20 million result items (20,000,000 rows x columns of data). While we expect this limit should be more than sufficient for the majority of JIRA instances, if running a Dataplane report produces an error indicating this limit has been reached, you may tune the limit with the following JVM parameter:

-Dcom.arsenalesystems.dataplane.query.result.limit = 30000000

JIRA Issue Fields

What JIRA issue fields are supported by Arsenale Dataplane?

Dataplane reports on a wide variety of JIRA field types including:

the majority of built-in JIRA fields
the majority of standard JIRA custom fields
custom fields from the following add-ons: JIRA Agile, Valiantys nFeed and Script Runner
all other third-party custom fields that are "stattable" (have been implemented using the JIRA CustomFieldStattable class)

For complete details, see the Dataplane Supported JIRA Fields page.

Why is my custom field not in the list of fields that can be reported on?

There are a few reasons why this may be the case:

your custom field may come from a third-party JIRA add-on that is not yet supported by Arsenale Dataplane. Dataplane currently supports custom fields from the following add-ons – JIRA Agile, Valiantys nFeed and Script Runner – as well as any other third-party add-on's custom fields that are "stattable" (have been implemented using the JIRA CustomFieldStattable class).
your custom field may not be supported in the context in which you are trying to use it in a Dataplane report. For example, historical reports, like the Issues Value by Date Report, support a different set of fields than reports based only on an issue's current field values, since not all JIRA fields are indexed historically. Additionally, only numeric-typed fields can be used in areas of the application that require a numeric field, such as for the Value option in the Sum Numeric Field by Date Report.
your custom field may not be in the list of Dataplane's Supported JIRA Fields
you just added a new JIRA custom field that is supported by Arsenale Dataplane but you have not yet:
1. rebuilt your JIRA index so that the custom field is useable by JIRA, and
2. clicked on Sync Index on the Dataplane Administration page so that the custom field is known to Dataplane

Calculations and Values

When reporting on time durations, are the calculated total, average, max and min times adjusted for non-working hours?

No. All reports that include time duration statistics—such as the Closure Time Report, Time in Status Report or the Sum Numeric Field Report—currently use a raw calculation of hours that makes no consideration for non-working hours.

For example:

21.25 hours in an Issues Work Log Table Report is exactly 21.25 hours of actual work completed, regardless of time of day, weekend or holiday
in a Closure Time Report or Time from Status to Status Report, a display of 36 hours for the average transition time in a reporting interval means 36 hours on a regular 24 hour clock, or 1.5 calendar days, rather than 4.5 working days of 8 hours each.

Administration

What does Sync Index do and when is it necessary?

In order to provide high performance historical reporting, Arsenale Dataplane builds and maintains its own optimized index of every change made to the issues in your JIRA instance. Once Dataplane's index is built—after initial installation, on upgrade or after manually clicking the Build Index button in Dataplane Administration—all subsequent issue changes in your JIRA instance are tracked by Dataplane in realtime.

There are a couple unconventional situations, however, where Dataplane's index of the state of your JIRA instance may not be completely up-to-date:

if you've added issues to your JIRA instance unconventionally, such as with the JIRA Importers Plugin, a third-party issue migration tool, or a command-line interface
if you've added a new custom field to your JIRA instance

Under any of the above circumstances, the new issues or custom field will not be available within Dataplane until you click on the Sync Index button on the Dataplane Administration page.

Sync Index tells Dataplane to re-synchronize its realtime indexing with the current state of your JIRA instance, picking up any new custom fields or unconventionally created JIRA issues. This incremental synchronization is very fast and should complete in under a minute on most instances.