Question
How frequently does my Support data synchronize to Explore?
Answer
The frequency at which your data synchronizes with Explore will depend on the Explore plan active on your account.
- If you are on the Explore Lite plan, your data synchronizes once every 24 hours. This synchronization should happen at midnight every day in the account's time zone. It is not possible to customize the time at which this sync takes place.
- If you are on the Explore Professional, Enterprise, or Legacy plan, your data syncs begin one hour after the most recent sync ended. The sync time is randomized within the hour, and in some cases could take up to two hours to complete.
- If you are on the Explore Enterprise plan, you also have the option to use live dashboards and live data widgets which update in near real-time.
Note: If there are no queries or dashboards executed in Explore for more than 30 days, the data refresh frequency is automatically changed to weekly. Once at least one of the queries or dashboards is accessed by the users or scheduled via email delivery the sync frequency is back to normal.
25 Comments
How often does my data sync on Explore Legacy? Is there a place to see the timestamp of when the data was last refreshed? If yes, is there a way to display that refresh time in a dashboard or query?
@Hillary, the Explore Legacy accounts are on the Explore Professional plan. So, the data sync will occur once every hour. You can check the time of the last data sync in the datasets section under the Last refreshed column.
Is there a reason why the refresh is randomised within each hour? I would have thought it would make more sense to refresh on the hour each hour. We are trying to establish hourly ticket solve dashboards but the data isn't of use to us until 2 hours later rather than 1 hour because the refresh time is randomised.
@Nathan,
Zendesk uses the shared infrastructure (see What is a "Pod"). That's why to provide a better performance and reliability data syncs are spread out through each hour. Our Dev team is working on providing real-time reporting functionality for some metrics which might be enough to fulfil your needs. Follow our announcements page to stay tuned - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200623776
Eugene Orman
Has something changed here and there is somewhere else to get this? I no longer see the last refresh date as part of this screen.
Removal of the last refresh is part of the new dataset update here.
>we understand that the current Last refreshed indicator has been causing confusion for a number of users. We will be moving this information to the Query Builder over the coming months.
Data syncs are randomized for load distribution. This ensures consistent performance for all customers within a shard. For more information about Zendesk technical architecture see https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661906.
Last refresh time can be found in the Query builder:
Is there a plan to improve how often the sync occurs?
For example, we are using Geckoboard to be able to create dashboards with live statistics for phone and chat since the built in ones leaves a lot to wish for..
So either
- is there any plans to build something with live dashboards directly in zendesk
or
- is there a plan to start syncing the data more frequently to be able to use it for live statistics?
Charlie Eriksson, they did recently announce the launch of some near real-time dashboards for those on the enterprise plan. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052761954-Live-data-widgets-for-Explore-Enterprise-dashboards
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@... Thank you!
It's definitely a step up, but since not all values are "live", we still can switch from for example Geckoboard and only use Zendesk for now.
Hopefully this is something that will be developed in the near future! :)
What exactly constitutes a query being "executed"?
"Note: If there are no queries or dashboards executed in Explore for more than 30 days, the data refresh frequency is automatically changed to weekly. Once at least one of the queries is executed the sync frequency is back to normal."
Hi Jacob! Sorry for the delayed reply. A query is executed when you access it - so either loading the query in Explore, or loading a dashboard that the query is placed on. It's also executed anytime a dashboard is shared, via schedule or manually.
Thanks Madison! 👍
That's much clearer and should be added to this article. Actually, when loading Explore while it is in this alternate sync schedule, it would be nice to be made aware of this - in an in-app message for instance.
I wonder for the Explore Professional, Enterprise, or Legacy plan, the max time to finish the data sync is 2 or 3 hours?
Hey Zhihui,
That would depend on how much data Explore has to sync. The more data in your account, the longer the sync can take.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Thanks for the answer Brett.
So it means that it may took 3 hours over to be ready for your latest dashboard if you have bunch of data to sync right?
Hey Zhihui,
That's correct it may take that long if you have a good amount of data on your account that needs to sync over to Explore :)
Thank you Brett.
I am also concerned about the randomization. We were told that explore is replacing insights and that is should at minimum have the base functionality that insights had. Insights would refresh hourly. We were also told explore would refresh hourly. Sounds like this is not the case if refreshes can occur beyond the 1 hour mark.
Greetings Reshma,
Thank you for contacting Zendesk Support. My name is Kharlo and I'll be assisting you today. The frequency at which your data synchronizes with Explore will depend on the Explore plan active on your account.
If you are on the Explore Lite plan, your data synchronizes once every 24 hours. This synchronization should happen at midnight every day in the account's time zone. It is not possible to customize the time at which this sync takes place.
If you are on the Explore Professional, Enterprise, or Legacy plan, your data syncs begin one hour after the most recent sync ended. The sync time is randomized within the hour, and in some cases could take up to two hours to complete.
If you are on the Explore Enterprise plan, you also have the option to use live dashboards and live data widgets which update in near real-time.
Kharlo | Customer Advocate
Is it correct to state that using our Explore Dashboard/Queries are not going to be an effective use for real time updates/understanding of open tickets within my support team?
We would have to stick to views for real time updates?
That would be fair yes. But Explore and views serve two different purposes. Using views in this case is a good suggestion in your use case.
Unfortunately Views is not the effective view/goal I was hoping to use the dashboard for.
- Especially considering there is a limited number of views that are easily displayed/accessible on the side/tool bar display.
Shi Bham Not sure what you mean exactly, but yes overall the support dashboard and looking at individual team members views/tickets is great. But as a manager, the dashboards within Explore would be far more ideal so that you can see at a high level over the whole team (upwards of 5-10 people) that I manage at any given time.
Managers/other leaders within an organization viewing the support tickets within Zendesk (myself included) would prefer not to have to click through each user's view just to see what happening (micro managing) but rather at a high objective level just look at tickets based on broader themes/tags/triggers for importance.
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