Azure DevOps Hidden Gems #8 – Turn Azure Board Queries into Dashboard Chart Items

Posted by Graham Smith on December 10, 2019No Comments (click here to comment)

I've been working with what we now call Azure DevOps for many years and I'm constantly amazed by features I never knew existed or which I vaguely knew existed but hadn't fully appreciated. In this blog post series I'm attempting to shine a light on some of these hidden gems for the benefit of others. The full list of posts is here and if you have any suggestions for other posts please leave a comment!

I was recently helping someone proficient in Jira find the equivalent feature in Azure DevOps. They were trying to find an Azure DevOps Dashboard widget that would display a pie chart of work items segmented by owner. Whilst there are a couple of widgets that report against work items they are quite limited and likely not what you want. It's not really a problem though because a powerful and flexible solution exists!

As the title of the blog has already given away, it's possible to turn Azure Board Queries into charts that can be displayed on Dashboards. The first step is to navigate to Boards > Queries and create a query:

Then, and crucially, save the query as a Shared Query:

Now in the query menu bar switch from Editor to Charts and click New Chart:

There are plenty of options to choose from but I've created a pie chart grouped by Assigned To:

Click OK to save the chart and then use the ellipsis to Add to dashboard:

You will now be able to select the dashboard you want the chart to appear on. You can make further edits to the chart from the dashboard using the widget's ellipsis but note that if you do so the chart will become unlinked from the query. There's not really much more to it but if you do want to dig deeper the official documentation is here.

Hope this helps!

Cheers -- Graham