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 relate to how different actors add comments to a ticket. These two metrics have many differences including that they are in two different datasets.

Public comments

Updates history dataset

The metric Public comments is within the Updates history dataset. Public comments represent all public comments on a ticket, including both end user and agent public comments.

Updates history dataset covers individual ticket events. This dataset is designed for narrow, targeted reporting rather than broad trends. For example, it can be used to filter by Updater attributes, such as Updater Name, to report on the number of updates made by individual users or agents. For more information see article: Counting agent comment updates
Other metrics within this dataset are Internal comment, Agent comment, and End-user comment.

Agent replies

Tickets dataset

The metric Agent replies represents all public comments added to a ticket by an agent, excluding ticket creation. For example, when an agent creates a ticket with a public comment, that first comment isn't counted. This may result in the public agent comment total being higher than the agent replies value.

The Tickets dataset covers ticket-level metrics, which are designed to make high-level, overview reporting more efficient.
The metric Agent replies is calculated differently for messaging channel tickets and in addition to all public comments added to a ticket by an agent. It also calculates based on the number of active and messaging conversations that include at least one agent message. This may result in the agent replies metric being lower than the combined total of agent messages and public agent comments. For example, if an agent sends three messages during one active conversation session and then the conversation ends, this will be calculated as a single agent reply.

For more information, see the articles:

Messaging dataset

The metric Agent replies represents the number of replies to the messaging ticket by an agent. Replies are defined as messages sent by the agent in response to an end-user message. For example, when a user sends a message and an agent replies, this is recorded as a single agent reply. Any additional messages sent by the agent in the same conversation will not increment the value until the user sends a new message.
Other metrics within this dataset are Agent messages, Requester messages and Requester replies.

More context

When analyzing ticket comment activity, you can report on who posted the comment, the agent or the end-user, and you can report on how that comment was posted to the ticket, the comment is public or internal. Only agents can post internal comments. To learn more, see the article: Adding comments to tickets.