Question
I accidentally deleted a custom metric, report, or dashboard from Explore. Can I recover a report or dashboard if the report owner was deleted from Zendesk?
Answer
No, deletions in reporting and analytics are irreversible and can't be recovered. If you remember the formula used, recreate the metrics, reports, or dashboards. They will still pull the same data as before.
While you can delete metrics and attributes, data can't be deleted. For more information, see the article: How do I delete data from Explore?
When deleting or downgrading users in Explore, see how dashboards are affected in the article: Best practices for removing agents.
7 comments
Stephen Unterberg
This is ridiculously unacceptable! I lost over 25 hours of billable work when another agent I shared it with accidentally deleted it (thinking he was on his team's dashboard at the time of his "oops" moment).
Is there a way to share a dashboard with others so that they cannot delete or edit it? I need to share my dashboards with others who edit and delete their own set of dashboards. We are on the same team.
1
Tony
I'm sorry to hear that one of your colleagues cancelled your report by mistake.
Explore does have different access level, that can be defined on the role itself. If you are using a custom role, then you will need to edit it, so it reflects your needs.
As you can see here, there are different roles. In your case, your agent will need to have the "View reports" role set in his/her Explore role.
You can do that, by setting it directly on the user's permissions page, or if the system says doesn't allow you to change it on the Roles and access page, then you can do two things: create a new custom role or edit the current one assigned to the user. In both cases, you will need to specify the explore access level to view report only. Here's how.
I hope that helps!
-2
Stephen Unterberg
Thank you for your prompt response. I very much appreciate it.
As I noted in my response above, "I need to share my dashboards with others who edit and delete their own set of dashboards." Your solution will prohibit my colleagues from being able to work on their own dashboards. It is also not scalable as we will have 20 other departments who will be facing the same challenge I am facing today.
I don't understand why and how Zendesk is not putting in some incredibly simple solutions that we came up with back in the 1990's:
1. A way to recover from critical and very expensive work on our system.
1a. It is amazingly too easy for someone to simply delete hundreds of hours of work and there is not way to recover from it.
2. A very simple two tiered system of access to our dashboards. Or some way to allow a type of access via tagging.... something? anything?
0
Tony
thank you very much for your feedback. I understand your point. I'll forward this feedback to our product team. As it is now, deletions in Explore are irreversible and cannot be recovered, and the Explore access can only be limited by the methods I shared with you previously.
But I would like to thank you very much for your time in sharing this feedback with us.
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Stephen Unterberg
Any chance this significant issue is going to be looked into? I cannot offer Explore to our department heads out of concern that someone with an edit role can delete other department's Dashboards. I need to know so I can put in a purchase order for a 3rd party system and remove "Explore" as one of our reasons to justify our enterprise level licensing.
0
Jupete Manitas
Hi Stephen, thanks for writing in!
We understand the point here but as mentioned previously at the moment deletions in Explore are irreversible and cannot be recovered. Hence, we are recommending revisiting your user access to explore and retraining those users with higher access not to delete any report unless it is a duplicate or cloned. We also encourage you to write a product on our explore community page to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning. Thank you!
0
Vaughan
Please make the DELETE action a unique permission that is not inclusive of EDIT. The feedback and lack of support from Zendesk on this thread is disappointing.
0