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Last updated: September 6, 2026

Dwell

A Jira Cloud app that measures how long work actually sat in each status, counted against your working calendar rather than raw elapsed time. Documentation and troubleshooting. Privacy policy.

The one idea

Jira records when an issue changed status. It does not tell you how long it sat anywhere. Most reports answer that by subtracting two timestamps, which counts nights, weekends and public holidays as working time. A ticket raised on Friday afternoon and picked up on Monday morning did not take three days of anybody's attention.

Running your first report

  • Open Apps → Dwell in Jira.
  • Put a JQL query in the box, for example project = ENG AND created >= -30d.
  • Choose Working hours, or Calendar time if your team genuinely runs around the clock.
  • Set your timezone, working week, day start and end, then press Run report.

What the settings mean

  • Measure — working hours excludes nights, weekends and holidays. Calendar time counts every millisecond.
  • Timezone — the zone your working day is defined in. Daylight saving is handled, so a spring-forward day really is an hour shorter.
  • Working week — Saturday/Sunday, Friday/Saturday, Sunday only, or all seven days.
  • Day starts and ends — 24-hour time, such as 09:00 and 17:00.
  • Holidays — comma separated, such as 2026-01-26, 2026-08-15. Each is excluded entirely.
  • Targets — optional, such as In Review: 8h, Blocked: 2d. Breaches are measured in working time, because an SLA that counts the weekend is not one anybody agreed to.

Save these settings stores them against your Atlassian account rather than the site, so two people on the same Jira can measure against different hours.

Cycle time

Measured from the first time an issue enters an in-progress status to the first time it reaches a done status. Which statuses count is read from Jira's own status categories, so there is nothing to configure and it stays correct across projects that name their statuses differently. Issues that never finished are excluded rather than counted as zero.

The dashboard gadget

Add Dwell — time in status to any Jira dashboard. It shows median working time per status for whatever you last saved on the Dwell page, using the same calendar. It has no settings of its own on purpose: a second place to configure the same thing is a second place for the two to disagree.

Reading the numbers honestly

  • Median, not average. Cycle times have long tails, and one ticket stuck across a shutdown drags an average somewhere no team recognises. The 85th percentile is the number to quote for a realistic worst case.
  • Partial history. Jira paginates very long changelogs. Issues where only part was returned are labelled, and their totals are a lower bound. Flagged rather than hidden, because a visibly incomplete number is more useful than a silently wrong one.
  • Re-entry counts. An issue that entered review four times is telling you something the total alone does not.

Limits

  • A report covers up to 200 issues. Narrow the JQL for a complete picture of a larger set; a report that quietly truncates is worse than one that says so.
  • Dwell is not a time-tracking tool. It measures how long work sat in a status, not how long a person spent on it. If you need hours per person, you want a worklog app.

Troubleshooting

A blank page, or a loading placeholder that never finishes

Almost always a DNS or network problem on your side, not the app. Every Forge app on the Atlassian Marketplace loads its interface from *.cdn.prod.atlassian-dev.net. If your network cannot resolve that domain, Jira draws the frame and then waits for an app that never loads, with no error message.

Confirm it in ten seconds by running nslookup probe.cdn.prod.atlassian-dev.net. If that returns nothing, that is your answer.

  • Router or ISP DNS. Point the machine at a public resolver. On macOS, sudo networksetup -setdnsservers Wi-Fi 8.8.8.8 1.1.1.1 then sudo dscacheutil -flushcache. On Windows, set DNS in the adapter's IPv4 properties.
  • Corporate firewall or proxy. Ask IT to allow *.cdn.prod.atlassian-dev.net. Atlassian documents it as required for any Forge app.
  • A browser extension. Ad blockers sometimes block third-party frames. Pause them for your Jira site and reload.
  • DNS filtering such as a Pi-hole, NextDNS or OpenDNS with an aggressive blocklist.

Other things

  • "Jira rejected the search" — the JQL is invalid or you cannot see the projects it names. Try the same query in Jira's own issue search.
  • The numbers look too small — check the Measure setting, and your holidays list. On working hours a Friday-to-Monday ticket shows hours, not days, because that is what actually happened.
  • The numbers look too big — check the working day and week. A day of 00:00 to 23:59 counts everything.
  • A target produced no breaches — the report warns when a target names a status no issue has. Check the spelling against the status names in the report.
  • The gadget disagrees with the page — it cannot, unless the page's settings were changed without saving. Press Save these settings and reload the dashboard.

Reporting a problem

Send the JQL, the settings you used, and roughly what you expected. If you can include an issue key where the number looks wrong, that is the fastest possible bug report: the calculation is deterministic, so one example usually reproduces it exactly.