You can monitor the data storage usage in your account and manage data storage as needed. If you reach your storage limit or expect that you will, you can remove data to free up space. Except for Team plans, you can purchase more storage to increase your limit.
This article contains the following sections:
Default storage limits
Over time, your company will accumulate a lot of data in your Zendesk account. This data is important to you for a lot of reasons. That's why all customers have the ability to store a default amount of ticket data and files, along with custom objects and user data. These storage limits exist to ensure the reliability and usability of Zendesk services. Most customers will never use all of their storage.
Storage consists of these parts:
- Tickets: the total size of all ticket storage objects in the Support ticketing system.
- File storage: the total size of all the files attached to storage objects in the Support ticketing system.
- Custom objects: The total size of all storage required to support custom objects, objects records, fields, permissions, and relationships added to the account.
- Users: The total size of all storage required to support users added to the account.
The default storage limits include a base storage amount for all plans and an additional per-seat allocation that varies per plan type:
| Plan | Base storage per account | Additional storage per agent | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support or Suite | Data storage | File storage | Data storage | File storage |
| Team | 10 GB | 10 GB | 50 MB per agent | 2 GB per agent |
| Growth | 10 GB | 10 GB | 100 MB per agent | 5 GB per agent |
| Professional | 10 GB | 10 GB | 100 MB per agent | 5 GB per agent |
| Enterprise, Enterprise Plus | 10 GB | 10 GB | 200 MB per agent | 10 GB per agent |
How Zendesk calculates your storage usage
Each ticket in your Zendesk account is composed of multiple data storage objects. For example, a ticket is composed of metadata, and then depending on what’s included in the ticket, a number of additional data storage objects such as attachments, events, tags, and so on. Archived tickets are included in the storage usage calculations, but deleted tickets (via soft delete or permanent delete) are not. If you use custom objects, each custom object record is calculated as 2 KB of storage. User storage is also included in the calculations. Storage requirements for original email messages and organizations are not included.
Monitoring storage usage
To help you monitor storage usage on your account, Zendesk provides a storage usage dashboard. You can use this dashboard to view your current usage and compare it against your storage limits.
The storage usage dashboard is not available for customers with self-service accounts.
To monitor storage usage
- In Admin Center, click
Home in the sidebar.
A summary of your storage usage appears on the Admin Center home page.
The summary shows your data storage and file storage as compared with the amount of storage you have remaining. If you are over your storage limit, you’ll see a warning symbol (!) in the summary.
- To view more details about your storage usage, click View details.
You can also follow these instructions to view storage usage details:
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Usage > Storage.
The detailed storage dashboard includes a summary of your usage, along with a chart for data storage and a chart for file storage.
The storage dashboard is refreshed every 24 hours to keep you current on your usage. The graph shows your usage over time as compared with your storage limit. The chart line is blue until you use over 80% of your storage. At that point, it turns to orange. If you exceed your storage limit, the line changes to red.
You can hover your mouse over each data point to get more information.
You can also use the drop-down menus to show the chart by time window and granularity.
Time window options include:
- Last 7 days
- Last 30 days
- Last 90 days
- Last 365 days
- Custom range
Granularity options include:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Quarterly
- In Admin Center, click
Storage notifications
When you’re approaching your storage limit by using more than 80% of your storage, you'll receive an in-product warning message. For example:
If you go over your storage limit, you’ll receive an in-product error message. For example:
Admins who don't have permission to make billing changes will see similar storage notifications, but they must contact a billing admin to add more storage.
To create more storage, you can do one of the following:
- Remove data to free up space
- Increase your storage limit. You must be an account owner or a billing admin to increase your storage limit.
Removing data to free up space
If it looks like you're near your storage limit, there are few things you can do to remove data from your account to free up space. Deletions can take up to 24 hours to show up on the storage dashboard.
Increasing your storage limits
| Plans | Data storage | File storage |
|---|---|---|
| Suite Growth or above | 500 MB | 25 GB |
| Support Professional or above | 500 MB | 25 GB |
You may want to increase your storage limit if:
- Your company is expanding. You anticipate accelerated growth within the next few months and higher ticket volumes.
- Historically, your company has needed more storage than other companies.
- Your company has a use case that creates an exceptional amount of customer service data.
- You're using custom objects with high record volume.
For pricing and purchasing information about the More Storage add-on, click the Request more storage in the Admin Center notification.
You must be an account owner or a billing admin to request more storage for your account. If you don't see a Request more storage link, contact your account executive or our Sales team to buy more storage.
When you request more storage, an automated bot will:
- Provide information so you can learn more about your storage options.
- Determine if you are eligible to purchase more storage.
- Help you file a ticket to purchase more storage.
Once you purchase more storage, no other action is needed. Zendesk will increase the limit for you.
35 Comments
@... if file atachments is 50MB it will counted as 50MB for the file storage and 0.10KB for the Data Storage. I supose,
Where can we see the total storage currently used?
+1 to that. It will be nice to have a dashboard to manage the available size.
Hi @... and @... we are in the process of building the storage dashboards, we expect to have this ready towards the end of this year (2021 for future readers - feel free to keep me accountable on this). I understand the desire to have that data available, and we are very much working to not surprise anyone with these limits.
Hi @... - basically yes. Technically, there are parts of Chat and Talk that create tickets and therefore are also affected by these limits, but for most customers Support is the product most affected.
Hi @... re: attachment limits. @... is correct in his interpretation, if a file attachment is 50mb, then it would count as 50mb towards file storage and 0.1 kb for data storage (the article will be updated to clear this up).
Regarding your earlier questions, we began implementing data storage limits in June 2020 (when this article was first published). We are rolling out stages of enforcement, and will not enforce broadly until it is available for customers to observe in the product. All enforcement will be done in good faith and in cooperation with customers affected.
Hi, Is there any way for us to get this information about the storage usage(total used,total available storage) through the Support API?
Hi @..., this information is not currently available through the Support API, as we integrate this information into the product (see my notes above) we would also make it available in the Support API, although the sequencing of UI/API work remains TBD.
Hi
You have mentioned by one of your comments that the data storage dashboard will be available end of 2021. I am still wondering if there is another way in the meanwhile to gather some information about the amount of data and file storage which has been cut by Zendesk?
We actually get huge attachments by requesters quite often and see that a lot of these attachments and also screenshots in former tickets "passed away" and just the ticket's text is present. This is not acceptable for us because we also have chosen Zendesk as a professional support system solution to keep all information exchange with our customers in a data base which even offers access to the ticket history after years. This seems not to be a fact based on the (not very obvious) data restrictions not such restrictions have not been clear (or even present?) when we decided to use Zendesk some years ago.
We got an offer for extending our Zendesk data and file storage space but we have no idea how many data and file storage we actually need or how much of space had been in use since we started our Zendesk based ticketing system in 2018. Such a key figure is required to adapt the (additionally paid) data and file storage area properly.
We urgently need some way to identify our actual data and file space requirements and adapt our license to this. Please let me know how we can figure this out?
Hi @...
Please email me at [edit: removing email from public internet for now - continued conversation over email] I do not believe that any "offer for extending our Zendesk data" is legitimate, as we are not sending out proactive requests in that manner at this point in time [edit: it was legitimate, but also confused]. Even if we were, based on our information on file, I believe that you are well within any existing limits and that any "offer for extending our Zendesk data" is not legitimate outreach from Zendesk. Having said that, I can only confirm that by connecting directly and confirming your account information.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Hi ,
We have been contacted to say we are over our storage limit and that a sales person would like to get on a call to discuss increasing our storage. This doesn't seem right at all (yes it was a legitimate ZD email) We don't even know what our current storage level is! What is the ETA on seeing our storage levels? We shouldn;t be asked to pay for anything extra if we can't even see the data.
Hi @...
Thanks for reaching out. I understand your frustration. Your sales rep should be able to share your data usage information with you, and should be able to share all relevant options. Contrary to earlier timelines, we do not expect to have data storage limits in the product in 2021. I know this is not a good experience, but we had to prioritize critical infrastructure work. I am planning on updating this thread as soon as we have a new date.
Sincerely,
Pablo
Where can we see the total storage currently used?
Where can I see the total storage currently used to maintain and when can we expect to have Storage Dashboard available?
Like Denny Lee is asking, when is it expected to have the dashboard available?
Hi Samsung Electronics America, Inc. - IT Account and Jysk IT en del af Sagro I/S - I can't commit to a date for the dashboard at this stage. We're doing work right now to enable retrieving the data through an API and then we'll build the UI to share that data back.
Pablo Kenney
Is there any news on the subject of UI?
Hi Daniel Ramlow - we have a working POC (Proof of Concept) and are now working on fitting in the work against other priorities. As soon as we have a fixed date, I'll update this thread.
+1
hi, when is it expected to have the dashboard available? what features to manage the storage?
any news on the dashboard? thank you!
Adding a +1 here. Any idea when this will be ready? Pablo Kenney
Seems counterintuitive to have to email when we need this info.
Hi Leigh KELSEY Dolores Vincenzo msoffia -
We are testing this now, and expect to have it in the product in the next 3 months. As you can imagine, making sure the data and data presentation are correct, clear, and easy to consume are very important here, and we're taking time to get that right. Given that we're almost 2 years from my original post in this thread, I fully understand the frustration. Please know that we are treating this is as a critical project across the company. cc:Sean Newton
thank you Pablo Kenney and we're excited this is being prioritized!
Hey Pablo Kenney Maxi here, a Zendesk partner.
I'm not sure if I'm missing something here, but from my understanding of this documentation, since absolutely all objects (including Closed tickets) count towards this limit, eventually all customers will reach the limit, right? Accounts will keep on receiving tickets and creating end-users and tags and so on, and data usage will continue to grow since there is no automatic removal of data. And I'm pretty sure you'll agree that asking customers to delete tickets is not a good user experience, particularly if they have to do it manually.
So my question is: is there any plan within this upgrade to other than show usage, also either remove from this KPI some data points or offer an automatic removal tool (as in an option to delete Closed tickets or end-user with no interactions after X days, where ideally X is defined by the customer)?
Outraged! I'm late to this party, but...how come there is not more OUTRAGE at this blatant EXTORSION by Zendesk.
1) 62 EUR / 68 USD per extra unit is THEFT. Not sure how units are calculated, but they seem to be losely based on 1-2 GB of storage. Want to know what the current GB of storage goes these days? Less than 0.020 USD. If we agree to this change we will 5x our yearly bill with Zendesk for something that should be peanuts.
2) We've been with Zendesk for over 10 years. We have hundreds of thousands of users, tickets, attachments, etc. Without a dashboard or detailed drilldown capabilites, I cannot selectively delete data. I can't just blindly delete old information because I have users, tickets with more important info from 2015, than from say 2020. Users with specific object data. Valuable attachments, tickets, etc.
3) This is obviously a milking strategy from zendesk. Another way to rake in money from existing customers, instead of grandfathering them into specific plans like other companies do. It already started with API rate limiting. Now it will be extra storage units. Next up? Probably number of tickets per agent, or length of agent response.
This is despicable. We've been with zendesk from the beginning, suffering from your initial growing pains when your service would fail on a daily basis. We stuck with you, only to be pushed into a corner will little to no options.
Fix this Zendesk. Do the right thing.
Hi Maximiliano Cooper
Yes, we have time based deletion tools planned for delivery this quarter and more advanced deletion capabilities on our roadmap (both via UI and API).
Hi Hugo Meana ,
I hear you, and am happy to respond to your points. If you'd like to discuss further, you're welcome to email me at pkenney@zendesk.com (I'm traveling this week so responses may be delayed).
1) Regarding the pricing, the costs are not based purely on the database storage, but instead the overall costs of compute, search, and labor to handle high storage accounts. If you compare to other vendors in our industry (which we have) - you'll find that our prices are similar and usually lower than industry standard. There is no doubt that it would be cheaper for you to export the data into your own database, but again you would lose the various services that we build into the cost profile.
2) I understand that ticket deletion and observability is more difficult than desired. We have significant work coming to improve this, but our teams can partner with you during this stage to help understand what's possible. As you'll note in the article, we already have a dashboard in EAP, and plan to continue that work.
3) I suspect we might ultimately need to agree to disagree on this last point, but as to your API rate limit example - we've had and enforced our API rate limits since roughly 2011. We have that rate limit because if accounts are using more of the API than that rate limit than we need to change our management and cost profile of the account - adding cost and complication to our infrastructure. Similarly, if accounts use a disproportionate amount of storage, then we incur a degree of cost and complication that is disproportionate to base costs for the given plan. This policy has been in place since June of 2020, and exists to ensure reliability and cost alignment.
We appreciate your loyalty to Zendesk and again I welcome direct conversation via email.
Our experience has been extremely challenging using this dashboard.
It does not give you any insight whatsoever into the amount of storage by tickets, vs users, etc. We just have to blindly take shots in the dark as to what to remove, and trust that its accurate. Zendesk enforcing something with so little transparency is an extremely negative experience.
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