VortexIQ Findings Open, Trello (API)

Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Project Management

Tickets we created from audit findings that haven’t been resolved yet.

At a glance

The number of Trello cards Vortex IQ created from audit findings that have not yet been archived or moved to a “Done” list. Trello is kanban-first: a finding is “open” if its card is still on the board and not closed. This card answers is the team’s board running ahead of the audit programme, or behind it? For a small ecommerce team using Trello as their primary planner, this is the single most important PM-tool metric.


What it counts	Trello cards where `desc` or a custom-field value contains `vortexiq_finding_id` AND `closed = false` AND the card’s current `idList` is NOT in the configured “done” list set.
API endpoint	`GET /1/boards/{id}/cards?filter=open&customFieldItems=true&fields=name,closed,idList,dateLastActivity,idMembers` from `https://api.trello.com/1`. We page using the `before` parameter when card counts exceed Trello’s default 1000-card cap.
Card-state filter	`closed = false`. Trello uses “closed” as a soft-delete (still recoverable from the board’s archive); we treat closed = resolved.
Done-list exclusion	Trello has no built-in “status”; status is implied by which list a card is on. Connector setup asks merchants to mark which lists count as “Done” (often called “Done”, “Shipped”, “Released”). Cards on those lists are excluded even if `closed = false`.
Archived cards	Excluded. Archive in Trello equals `closed = true`.
Archived boards	Excluded. Trello calls these “closed” boards; their cards never reach the count.
Board / workspace scope	All Trello boards in the connected workspace where the connector setup tagged the board as `vortex_iq_outbound`. Multi-workspace merchants connect each workspace separately; this card aggregates across all connected workspaces.
Time window	`RT`. Refreshed within 90 seconds of Trello’s webhook firing.
Alert trigger	`> 20 open` raises a warn-level alert.
Time zone	Trello stores `dateLastActivity` as ISO-8601 UTC. Vortex IQ aligns the `RT` window to UTC.
Multi-workspace aggregation	Yes. Each Trello workspace’s open count is summed; per-workspace stack panel available.
Roles	owner, operations

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Trello (API) data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

A small UK gift-shop DTC brand on Shopify, 6-person team, runs Trello as their entire planning tool. Snapshot taken on 02 May 26 at 11:00 BST.

Trello board	Lists	Open cards with `vortexiq_finding_id`
Site Operations	Backlog (12), In Progress (4), Done (excluded)	16
Catalogue & Photography	Inbox (8), This Week (3), Done (excluded)	11
Customer Experience	To Triage (3), Doing (1), Released (excluded)	4
Total open		31

Open count           31
Warn threshold       20  (>20 fires)
30D average          18
Delta vs 30D avg     +72%

What the merchant should read into this:

Above warn threshold. 31 open findings on a 6-person team is a lot of work in flight. Trello’s strength is visibility (the cards are right there on the board) but its weakness is that nothing forces prioritisation.
Most of the queue lives in “Backlog” or “Inbox” lists. A small team with 23 cards in backlog lists is a planning gap, not an execution gap. The team needs a 15-minute weekly grooming meeting to move cards into “This Week” or “In Progress” or to archive what they will not do.
Catalogue board is the bigger surface area. 11 cards on the catalogue board is twice the rate of the CX board, which suggests the audit programme is finding more catalogue regressions than the team can absorb. Either the catalogue lead needs help, or the audit programme needs tighter targeting (e.g. exclude category pages with under £200/month revenue).
CX board is healthy. Only 4 open cards. The CX team is keeping up; do not borrow time from CX to address the catalogue backlog because that just shifts the problem.
Pair this card with Abandoned Findings. A growing open count is acceptable if cards are still moving; a stagnant board with growing abandonment is the real warning.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Card	Why it matters next to Findings Open	What the combination tells you
Abandoned Findings (>14d)	Detects when the board has gone stagnant.	Open growing AND abandoned growing equals capacity issue; open growing but abandoned flat equals normal active board.
Finding Resolution Rate (90d)	The team’s batting average.	Resolution > 75% with open climbing equals over-finding, not under-fixing.
VortexIQ Findings In Progress	Splits open cards into “actively being worked” vs “queued in backlog list”.	Low in-flight share equals work in backlog limbo, the most common Trello pathology.
Avg Time-to-Fix (days)	Cycle-time signal for findings.	Open up + time-to-fix up equals stretched team; open up + time-to-fix flat equals over-finding.
Tickets by Assignee	Trello uses `idMembers` for assignment; this card surfaces concentration.	Heavy concentration on one member equals reassignment opportunity.
Overloaded Assignees (>10 open)	Single-point-of-failure detection.	One overloaded member + high open count equals queue-review priority for the week.
Sprint Progress	Trello “sprints” are usually weekly board cycles; this measures completion within them.	Low sprint progress + high open count equals findings being added but not committed to weekly cycles.

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Trello’s own UI:

trello.com/b/{boardId} for each vortex_iq_outbound board, then use the board-level Filter cards menu (top right). Add Custom Field → vortexiq_finding_id → has any value then either eyeball the count or use Trello’s Card Counter Power-Up to see per-list totals at the top of each list. Trello does not have a workspace-level search-and-count UI; the closest is trello.com/search which can filter by is:open and has:customField.

For multi-board view, Atlassian’s Atlassian Analytics (paid add-on) ingests Trello and produces dashboards across boards; alternatively the BigPicture Power-Up offers a portfolio-style rollup. Why our number may legitimately differ from a board-filter count:

Reason	Direction	Why
Time zone	Boundary day off	Trello stores `dateLastActivity` in UTC; the Trello UI shows times in the viewer’s browser timezone. For a real-time count this rarely matters, but date-bounded comparisons can shift by one calendar day.
Done-list configuration drift	Either	Our count excludes lists configured as “Done” in connector setup; if you renamed your “Done” list to “Released” without updating the connector, we will count cards on it as open. Re-confirm done-list mapping in Settings → Connectors → Trello → Done lists.
Closed-card recovery	Ours lower	A card that was archived (closed) but never restored stays excluded from our count; Trello’s “Archived items” view includes them.
Custom-field detection	Ours lower	Trello stores custom-field values as separate API resources (`/customFieldItems`), not inline on the card. If a card was created before the connector setup wrote the `vortexiq_finding_id` custom field, the value lives only in the description. We fall back to description matching, but if the description was edited to remove the marker, the card drops out.
Cross-workspace aggregation	Ours wider	Trello UI scopes to one workspace; we aggregate.
Rate limits	Ours up to 5 minutes stale	Trello’s API rate-limits at 300 requests / 10 seconds per token. On large workspaces with thousands of cards, we may serve a 1-5-minute-old count during scheduled refreshes.

Cross-connector reconciliation. Trello vs incident-management peers:

Card	Expected relationship	What causes the divergence
`datadog.dd_incidents_active`	Independent. Datadog’s incidents are server-side; Trello’s findings are planning-side.	A live incident in Datadog with no corresponding Trello card means the team has not yet planned the remediation work.
`newrelic.nr_open_incidents`	Same shape.	Same reasoning.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My Trello board filter says 27, you say 31. Why? The four-card gap is almost always one of: (1) Done-list mapping drift, a list was renamed and the connector setup still treats it as not-done; (2) Custom-field-vs-description fallback, cards created before the custom field existed match by description marker, which is fragile; (3) Cross-workspace aggregation, we sum, Trello UI scopes; (4) Webhook lag (90 seconds). Open per-workspace stack panel and reconcile. Trello has no “status” field. How do you know what’s “done”? Trello’s data model uses lists as the only status primitive. The connector setup asks merchants which lists count as “Done” (typically named “Done”, “Shipped”, “Released”, “Live”, or “Won’t Do”). Cards on those lists are treated as resolved. If the team uses a different naming convention (e.g. “On Production”, “Deployed”), update the mapping in Settings → Connectors → Trello → Done lists. There is no automatic detection because Trello’s flexibility is its strength and we will not impose a status taxonomy that disrupts your team’s existing workflow. We have multiple Trello workspaces (one per agency client). What does this card show? Sum across every Trello workspace connected. Per-workspace stack panel from the connector drawer breaks them out. A card was important enough to fix manually. Do we need to archive it? Yes. Either move it to a “Done” list or archive it (Trello menu → Archive). Otherwise the card stays in this count and contributes to abandonment timing (14 days of no movement). Vortex IQ does not auto-archive cards based on the audit rerun result. Open count dropped suddenly. What changed? Three usual causes. (1) A board was archived (closed), all cards on it dropped from the count immediately. (2) A teammate did a bulk archive via Trello’s Archive cards in this list menu. (3) The connector was paused, check the connector status indicator. Trello’s audit log lives at Workspace settings → Audit logs (Trello Premium / Enterprise only). My count doesn’t match the Card Counter Power-Up’s per-list total summed across the board. Why? The Card Counter Power-Up counts every card on the list, including cards without a vortexiq_finding_id. Our count is only the audit-finding subset. If your team uses Trello for many things beyond audit follow-up (which is typical), most of the cards on the board are not findings and are not in our number. Is Trello the right PM tool for this metric? Trello fits teams of 1-50 who prefer kanban over sprint-planning, and merchants who want zero-friction onboarding for non-technical staff. Its weakness for this metric is the absence of native status, sprint, and reporting primitives, every other PM tool in this set (Asana, ClickUp, Monday, Linear, Basecamp) has stronger reporting machinery for findings. If your team has outgrown a flat board (e.g. 10+ contributors, multi-week cycles, dependency tracking), Asana or Linear gives you a richer read of this same metric. If you want to stay on Trello, the highest-leverage upgrade is the Custom Fields Power-Up combined with disciplined “Done” list naming so we can read the data cleanly. Today’s count looks volatile. Trello cards are easy to drag, easy to archive, easy to create. At low volumes (< 10 open findings) the count moves visibly with each click. The 7-day moving average beneath the headline is the steadier read. What if I don’t have the Custom Fields Power-Up enabled? We fall back to description-string matching against the vortexiq_finding_id token we wrote at card creation. This works but is fragile: if a teammate edits the description and removes the token, the card drops from our count even though it is still operationally a finding. Custom Fields Power-Up is free on Trello Standard and above; enabling it eliminates this fragility entirely.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

VortexIQ Findings Open is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Trello (API) and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.

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VortexIQ Findings Open, Trello (API)

At a glance

Calculation

Worked example

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

​At a glance

​Calculation

​Worked example

​Sibling cards merchants should reference together

​Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

​Known limitations / merchant FAQs

​Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

At a glance

Calculation

Worked example

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre