What is the difference between public comments and agent replies in reporting?

Question

What options do I have to report on different ticket comment activities in Explore?

Answer

The metrics Agent replies and Public comments both describe how people add comments to a ticket. They differ in several ways, and they live in different datasets.

Public comments

Updates history dataset

The Public comments metric sits in the Updates history dataset. It counts all public comments on a ticket, from end users and agents.

The Updates history dataset covers individual ticket events. Use it for narrow, targeted reports, not broad trends. For example, filter by Updater attributes, such as Updater name, to report on updates by a specific user or agent. For more information, see Counting agent comment updates.

Other metrics in this dataset are Internal comment, Agent comment, and End-user comment.

Agent replies

Tickets dataset

The Agent replies metric counts all public comments that an agent adds to a ticket, except during ticket creation. For example, if an agent creates a ticket with a public comment, that first comment doesn’t count. As a result, the total public agent comments can be higher than the Agent replies value.

The Tickets dataset covers ticket-level metrics. It supports efficient, high-level overview reports.

Definition differences across datasets

The term Agent replies has different definitions across datasets:

In the Tickets dataset, it refers to all public comments that agents add to a ticket.
In the Messaging dataset, it refers to replies that agents send in response to end-user messages in messaging-based conversations.

How Agent replies are calculated for messaging channel tickets

For messaging channel tickets, Explore calculates Agent replies differently. In addition to all public comments from an agent, the metric also counts the number of active messaging conversation sessions that include at least one agent message.

Multiple agent messages that an agent sends in one active conversation session count as a single Agent reply. For example, if an agent sends three messages in the same active conversation and then the conversation ends, that exchange counts as one Agent reply.

This method unifies how message-based activity appears across datasets and treats related agent responses as one interaction.

For more information, see the articles:

Messaging dataset

In the Messaging dataset, Agent replies equals the number of replies to a messaging ticket by an agent. A reply is the agent’s first message that follows an end-user message. Additional agent messages in the same conversation don’t count as new replies until the user sends another message.

This definition differs from the Tickets dataset, where Agent replies reflects all public agent comments. In the Messaging dataset, Agent replies measures conversation turns between end users and agents, not the number of messages sent.

Other metrics in this dataset are Agent messages, Requester messages and Requester replies.

More context

When you analyze ticket comment activity, you can report on who posted the comment (agent or end user) and whether the comment is public or internal. Only agents can post internal comments. To learn more, see Adding comments to tickets.