Insights date dimensions

Zendesk Explore is our new analytics software. In the future, we’ll be discontinuing Insights and you’ll need to start using Explore. To make the move now, see Moving to Explore from Insights.

Zendesk Support sends key dates for Tickets, Users, Orgs, Events, and NPS® to Insights. You can slice metrics by any of these available date attributes, known as date dimensions.

Note: You can also filter multiple date dimensions using a single date filter on a dashboard. This is known as a disconnected date dimension. For more information, see Understanding disconnected date dimensions.

This article contains the following topics:

• About Insights date dimensions
• Date hierarchies
• Date intervals

About Insights date dimensions

Insights receives the following dates as time-based attributes:

Table 1. Time-based attributes

Attribute	Definition
Date (Ticket Created)	Date the ticket was created
Date (Ticket solved)	Date the ticket was most recently solved
Date (Event)	Date of a ticket event or call
Date (Ticket Assigned)	Date the ticket was most recently assigned
Date (Ticket Initially Assigned)	Date the ticket was initially assigned
Date (Assignee Updated)	Date assignee last updated the ticket
Date (Requester Updated)	Date the requester last updated the ticket
Date (Ticket Last Updated)	Date of the last ticket update; this includes any update to the ticket, not just agent updates
Date (Ticket Due)	Date the ticket is due (from system Due Date field)
Date (User Created)	Date the user was created
Date (User Updated)	Date the user was most recently updated
Date (User Last Login)	Date the user last logged in
Date (User Last NPS Survey Date)	Date of the most recent NPS survey sent to the user
Date (NPS Rated)	Date that a Net Promoter Score℠ survey was rated
Date (Updater Created)	Date the updater was created
Date (Organization Created)	Date the organization was created
Date (Organization Updated)	Date the organization was updated
Date (Timeline)	Disconnected date filter

To produce accurate results your date attribute needs to match one of your metrics. For example Date (Ticket Created) and Date (Ticket Solved) are both related to tickets, so you should use them with the # Tickets metric. Date (User Updated) and Date (User Last Login) are both related to users, so you should use them with the # Users metric.

Understanding date hierarchies

Date attributes have a corresponding hierarchy. The hierarchy goes from broad to narrow, as follows:

Date > Week > Month > Quarter > Year

You can think of this hierarchy as Date being the most specific attribute while year is the most general. Insights can report on the current period for any of these attributes or use them in floating ranges. For example, you can create a report that covers the past 30 days, last week, or this quarter. With the right reporting filters, Insights will automatically update the results over time, so they always have the same relation to 'today.' For more information on date filters, please see Understanding disconnected date dimensions in Insights and Insights metrics reference.

Insights date dimensions do not include the time of day. The most specific attribute in the hierarchy is date. You can identify trends throughout the day by using Hour attributes, such as Hour of Event or Hour Ticket Created. While Insights can report on the current day, it cannot report on the current time. This means, you can create a report showing yesterday and today, but you cannot report on the past 24 hours.

Note: In Insights, the Hour and Date attributes are based on the time zone of the Zendesk account. It does not consider the time zone of your agent profile or browser. For information on how Insights uses your time zone, see Setting the time zone for Insights.

Date intervals

Each level of the date hierarchy (except the Year) can be measured in generic or chronological intervals.

Generic date intervals

Generic date intervals include all data relating to the same recurring period. These attributes combine data across all years, so they are great for reporting on broad trends. With generic date intervals, you can see if the sales team slows down at a specific point in the quarter, if you receive more tickets in certain months, or if your first reply times are higher on certain days of the week.

Generic date intervals include:

• Day of Month
• Day of Quarter
• Day of Week
• Day of Year
• Week (Sun-Sat)
• Week (Mon-Sun)
• Week of Quarter
• Month
• Month of Quarter

Chronological date intervals

Chronological date intervals return data for defined dates or periods. These attributes are more specific, so they are great for reporting on details. With chronological date attributes, you can compare earnings from last quarter to the one before it, review satisfaction survey results over the past three months, or see how many tickets your team solved last week. These attributes are typically labeled with '/Year.'

Chronological date intervals include:

• Date
• Week (Sun-Sat)/Year
• Week (Mon-Sun)/Year
• Month/Year
• Quarter/Year
• Year

Differences between date intervals

Generic date intervals do have a few important uses. In almost all cases though, chronological date intervals are the better choice.

Below is an example report displaying the two date intervals:

The report on the left represents a generic date interval with the attribute Month (Ticket Created). It shows 206 total tickets for November. This number counts every November on record, not just the selected year.

The report on the right represents a chronological date interval using the Month/Year (Ticket Created) attribute. It shows that 43 of those 206 tickets were created in just November 2012. The other tickets were created in previous Novembers, dating back to when the account was first created.