How to Get Automatic Alerts for Stalled Work in Jira

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Hey, Atlassian Community!

How do you know when a critical task gets stuck? You can scan your boards and filters, but it’s easy to miss a high-priority bug sitting in ‘Code Review' for too long.

It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s why we built the Alarms function of Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira. Using this function, you can configure alarms for issues that exceed your time thresholds.

This is the second article in the Scheduled Reports & Alarms series. Please see the first Community article to learn more about the feature.

Now, let’s discover Alarms, how you can use them, and what advantages they have to offer.

From Reactive to Proactive with Alarms

Instead of you having to search for problems, Alarms bring them directly to you. You can set simple rules for what matters to your team. For example, get an alert if:

-An issue stays "In Progress" for more than 5 days.

-A work item’s Cycle Time exceeds 10 business days.

The Alarms feature works by running Timepiece reports on a predefined schedule and sending you notifications if there is anything in the report worth your attention.

Let’s tell it by showing it

Let’s try to set an alarm for issues that have Cycle Times longer than 7 days.

First, you prepare a 'Status Duration' report. Using the 'Statuses' panel, you add a Consolidated Column named 'Cycle Time' and select the statuses that you consider to be part of your Cycle Time metric:

Add any statuses you want to include in your Cycle Time report.

Then use the ‘Filter’ feature of Timepiece and filter the issues in the report to show only the issues that have ‘Cycle Time’ longer than 7 days.

If you are lucky and there are no issues that match that filter, your report will be empty. That is fine. That is probably something to celebrate.

You can filter your report.

Save your report as a Parameter Set. Let’s name it 'Open work with Cycle Time more than 7 days'.

You can save, load and share your reports.

The report is ready. Now, let’s move on to the scheduling and alarm step.

Click the "Scheduled Reports & Alarms" button located on the right-hand side of the toolbar on the main app page.

Create a new Scheduled Report.

Select the ‘Open work with Cycle Time more than 7 days’ parameter set that you saved earlier:

You can bring back your saved parameter sets to use in the Scheduled Report.

Then, configure the report’s schedule:

Configure and view your report’s execution dates.

Finally, add an action to your Alarm configuration to send the results as an email and select the recipients.

Don’t forget to set the “When should this task run?” option to “Run this task when the report has at least one row”. This will make sure that you get notification messages only when there are issues in your report. In other words, when there are issues with Cycle Time longer than 7 days.

(By the way, you can send notifications to Slack or MS Teams channels as well)

To use automated reports as an alarm, select ‘run this task when the report has at least 1 row’ in the task section.

Save the Scheduled Report configuration and that's it. The report will run on your schedule, and you’ll get a notification only when there’s something worth your attention. If everything is running smoothly, your inbox (or Slack or MS Teams channels) stays quiet.

Why Proactive Alerts Matter for Your Business

Here’s how using Alarms can make your team’s life easier:

Reduce Project Risk: You’ll get an alert only when you need to jump in. This gives you more time to fix things before they affect your deadlines.

Increase Team Efficiency: You no longer need to manually scan your Jira board every day to look for stuck issues. Timepiece does the monitoring for you.

Build a Culture of Accountability: When the team knows that delays are flagged automatically, it becomes easier to discuss blockers and keep work moving forward.

We hope this new feature helps your team stay on track and focus on what matters most. I'm part of the team at OBSS that develops Timepiece. You can find Timepiece - Time in Status for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace, where you can explore more details and find our documentation.

Please let us know if you have any questions!