Zendesk automatically archives tickets 120 days after they are marked Closed. Archiving tickets speeds up the loading time for Views, especially those views that include multiple tickets which have been closed for a long period of time.
Note: Tickets with more than 1000 events will not be automatically archived.
Archived tickets are still accessible and actionable. The following table includes actions you can take on an archived ticket:
| Function | Details | Available? |
|---|---|---|
| Direct access | Access a ticket directly via URL (e.g., https:// yourdomain .zendesk.com/agent/#/tickets/37) | |
| Search | Searching for ticket(s) and accessing from search results | |
| User profiles | Viewing a list of tickets associated to a user (e.g., assigned tickets, CCed tickets) | |
| Insights reporting | Insights, powered by GoodData | |
| Explore reporting | Zendesk Explore resources | Yes |
| Group profiles | Viewing a list of tickets associated to a Group | |
| Organizational profiles | Viewing a list of tickets associated to an Organization | |
| Incremental export | Available API endpoint detailing which tickets have been recently updated | |
| My activities | Viewing a list of tickets associated with your requests. Archived tickets will still be labeled as "solved" in My activities. | |
| Views | Used to create filtered lists of tickets . Archived tickets will be excluded from these lists. | |
| Rules | Triggers and Automations allow you to automate actions on tickets. Rules cannot be executed on archived tickets. | |
| API | All ticket API endpoints except Listing Tickets, Listing Ticket Metrics, Ticket Skips, and Listing Ticket Audits return archived tickets. | |
| Classic reporting | Classic reporting tools under Admin > Manage > Reports in Zendesk Support. Only available for accounts created before April 30, 2015. | |
| Customer context | Used to gather information about the requester and their previous tickets. Archived tickets do not show under interactions in this feature. | No |
| Data export | Full export of your data (Professional and Enterprise plans only). See Exporting data to a JSON, CSV, or XML file. | Yes |
If you experience any issues with ticket archiving, please contact us so we can collect further information and troubleshoot the issue.
18 Comments
Hi everyone,
Just wanted to add some of my thoughts and findings on this issue.
0) The issue here is not intuitive in the least in your documentation. I found out this issue existed because I ran an API call and noticed that the lowest ticket ID i got was in noooo way the oldest ticket we had in the system. Then googling got me to this page. Again, thats not intuitive at all, and I'm going to bet countless people have bugs in their code now that they had no idea they had.
1) I've seen it mentioned by some zendesk folks that the info is "stll available via the API", welll nooooooooot reaaaaaaaally. Calling a basic tickets list from the API does not reveal any of the "archived" tickets, only the active ones. You can call the API with the Ticket ID if you happen to have that handy.
I've found you can get ALL of the tickets (included those in the archive) with the following https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/core/incremental_export#tickets
However this also lists the "deleted" tickets as I can see them, which I would prefer not to get.
2) I've also seen some zendesk folks say that this is "for performance reasons". This is doing the opposite if anything, its a pretty awful solution to the problem as well frankly.
Make it more intutive to call tickets from a specific start time, thats the easiest solution. If you don't want the older tickets, dont call for them with the API, you can make it that simple. I'm really having a hard time understanding why you didnt go with this approach. You can use the exact same logic in the URL scheme you had in incremental tickets and it'd be fine.
Currently the best way to get through this possible with the least amount of calls I must make an API request to the incremental tickets endpoint, going through EVERY ticket, even the ones I have deleted. How is this better performance than listing only active tickets?
3) Currently this issue does not affect my situation much as we're currently closing our zendesk account (not for satisfaction reasons, our company just went through an acquistion) and I'm writing a script to archive all of the old ticket and comment data.
However if it was my situation ( as it was just a few months ago for me ) that we needed to query all of the ticket data for proper metrics, this would be adding tons of extra queries to my code.
I understand you put this policy in place in order to help performance issues, but if anything this just means I'm going to be spamming your servers way more for the same information. Currently I don't mind spamming your servers, but I'm guessing this isn't helping the performance of your servers getting all of these needles API calls.
TL:DR anyone who has this same issue with the API should use this to get around the issue, it sucks but it works
https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/core/incremental_export#tickets
So today I also notice that out ticket numbers were double the number or the "all Tickets" in our view area. Alarms starting ringing!!
I then did some digging to find that 1/2 our tickets had been "Archived"
I want to see all our tickets in the views.
Surely it's our choice if we want all our data shown or a faster loading.
It would be better to have it as a default not to archive our tickets, then just have box that warns you after you have hit # of tickets that loading views may start to slow down. Then give us the option to archive tickets and what tickets we want to archive e.g. tickets older that 360 days etc
:(
So without resorting to API calls, how can I get a customizable "view"-like list of tickets that have been archived?
It is very weird when you google why you just lost 1000+ tickets and the answer is to pay more money to Zendesk or you cannot view your tickets. Promptly getting rid of this junky software.
I agree that this is a huge pain for companies that value their historical support data. This is important for any businesses that needs to analyse the effectiveness as well as any trends associated with their support. Often, this is required to be shared with customers following their query. We also need to be able to include our custom fields in this data for classification.
I believe the API is accessible via Excel (using Power Query). I think this may be an option but we still need to do some work on it. Maybe Zendesk could provide some Excel templates to assist with the current gap in their production solution (which was not a gap when we signed onto Zendesk several years ago).
Presently, we have extracting the data from views periodically and then merge the data. Indeed it is very painful.
Hi VO!
Are you looking to clean up your support addresses, or your users?
Hi Giovanni
I recently discovered Power BI Desktop (a free download from Microsoft).
There is a connector to Zendesk. I hoping that this will be the solution, and I am looking for bringing in historical ticket but am yet to confirm.
Regards
Adrian
We are not as concerned with End User/Requester and have tickets that were opened and commented by a Requester/End User that is now still active but is no longer our customers vendor. Due this we how can we archive tickets accocate to the vendor of record at the time and then disassociating them from the Org without having the ticket data now updated with the default Requester/End User's Organization?
Hi Jessie,
Looking to clean up the old addresses which are not active but the data that is archived should not be impacted.
Hi Richard,
It sounds like you're looking to preserve the Organization listed on a ticket when a user is no longer part of that Organization instead of having the ticket show the user's current default Organization — is that correct?
A ticket must be Closed before it can be archived. Once a ticket is Closed, it can no longer be edited. I tested this out to be sure, and a ticket will keep the Organization selected at the time the ticket was Closed, even if the user is later moved to a different Organization later.
I hope this helps — if you have any questions on this, please let us know!
Guess creating a report in Insights is the only option.
I'd like a csv export though.
How we can clean up old email addresses without impacting any data that is linked to archived tickets, etc.
Hi, I'm trying to get data on archived tickets, specifically first_resolution_time_in_minutes and full_resolution_time_in_minutes. Archived tickets are not included in List Ticket Metrics queries, and the Search API does not show metrics for tickets. As far as I can tell, this means I'll need to:
This is so inefficient and seems like you're specifically trying to make it hard for us to get historical data on our tickets. Am I missing something? Is there another way I can get this data? FWIW, we're only trying to access tickets created between January - May 2018. Seems like it shouldn't be this hard!
Hey, thanks for your reply!
My view settings:
My view results:
Thanks,
Hey VO, I'm still not clear on whether you're looking to remove old customer email address or your own support email addresses. Can you give me more detail on what you're trying to do?
Hi, I just created a view for tickets which statuses have been closed for over 120 days and I still see many closed tickets when I should actually not see anything as they should be archived. Is this ticketing archiving still working?
Hi Elisa -
What conditions are you using to create this view? I tested this in on my end creating a view that looks at tickets with 2880 hours (120 days) since being closed and it did not return and tickets. If doing this does return tickets in your Zendesk, please submit a ticket to support@zendesk.com for us to look into. :)
Hi Katelyn!
Thanks for your question, and a good one at that!
What I think will be useful for your use case are the following:
You are correct that archived tickets aren't included when querying the tickets API endpoints. However, if you want to query archived ticket data, you'll want the incremental exports endpoint. And since you're also looking for ticket metrics, you can side load the ticket metrics endpoint with your incremental exports api query.
Hopefully this helps!
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