Explore FAQ: Using Explore

Use this article to help you answer some of the most frequently asked questions about Zendesk Explore.

The questions in this article are related to things you might need to know while using Explore. For other frequently asked questions, see one of the following articles:

• Explore FAQ: General, activation, and billing
• Explore FAQ: Learning and community

If there's a question you'd like to see on this page, tell us in the comments below. However, if your question is urgent, contact us using any of the normal channels.

This article contains the following topics:

• Getting started
• Using Explore

Getting started

• Where is the documentation?

  Zendesk Explore resources is the best place to start.

• That's a lot of documentation! What's the best place to dive in?

  If you already have some experience with Explore, Zendesk Explore resources will help you find your way around. If you've never tried Explore before take a look at our Getting started guide which will teach you all of the basics.

• How can I control which agents can access Explore?

  Explore feature user roles and permissions that you can use to control which agents can access Explore, and the level of access they have. For more information, see Giving agents access to Explore.

• Can light agents access Explore?

  Yes. You can share dashboards with light agents as long as they have the Viewer permission. For more information, see Giving agents access to Explore.

Using Explore

• Can I schedule report deliveries to people who don't have a Zendesk account?

  No. However, you can export a report as an image, spreadsheet, or PDF file, and then email it to whoever you want.

  Zendesk is currently running an EAP that adds the ability to share dashboards with people who don't have a Zendesk account. For more information, see Dashboard sharing outside of Zendesk.

• How often does the data in an Explore report update?

  For Explore Lite: Each day at midnight in the timezone of the account.

  For Explore Professional: One hour after the most recent update. The update time is randomized within the hour and in some cases might take up to two hours to complete.

  Note: If there are no queries or dashboards accessed in Explore for more than 30 days, the data refresh frequency is automatically changed to weekly. Once at least one query is accessed the data refresh frequency is restored to normal.
• I want to write my own reports. Where do I find the metrics and attributes I need?

  See our Understanding Explore datasets article for details about all of the data you can use to create reports.

• I created some custom ticket fields to collect extra information. Can I see these in Explore?

  Yes. Explore synchronizes ticket, user, and organization custom fields. See Reporting with custom fields.

• Can I create reports based on ticket tags?

  Yes. For information about how to do this and examples, see Reporting with tags.

• I can't see any dashboards. What's the problem?

  If any of your agents with the viewer role can't see any dashboards, ensure that the dashboards have been shared with them. For details, see Getting started sharing dashboards. If you've just activated Explore and can't see the pre-built dashboards, ensure your own Explore account has the admin role (see Giving agents access to Explore).

• Only partial results are returned by my query and an error message is displayed. What's going on?

  To limit performance issues, Explore currently returns only the first 50,000 rows from a query. To successfully run the query, consider using a filter to limit the results returned (see Adding metrics and attributes to queries).