In Explore, datasets give you access to your Zendesk product data. Each dataset contains metrics and attributes that can be used to query your data.
Before you create a report, you'll need to choose the dataset that gives access to the information you want. Typically, you select the default dataset that contains data for your product, for example, Support or Talk. However, you can also create copies of these datasets for testing (for example, if you want to test custom metrics or need to apply specific security permissions).
Available datasets
The following datasets are currently available in Explore:
Zendesk Support datasets
The following datasets can be used to produce reports based on your tickets, and support data:
- Tickets: Report key ticket metrics like number of tickets, ticket activity, and ticket type.
- Updates history: Report all updates made to tickets during their lifetime.
- SLAs: Report about your Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance.
- Backlog history: Report about your unsolved tickets at the end of a given date.
Zendesk Talk datasets
The following datasets can be used to produce reports based on your usage of Zendesk Talk:
- Calls: Report about your call center and agent activity.
Zendesk Guide datasets
The following datasets can be used to produce reports based on your usage of Zendesk Guide:
- Knowledge Capture: Reports to help you understand the efficiency of selecting articles to deflect support tickets.
- Team Publishing: Reports to help you understand your team activity in Guide including when articles are created, published, edited, and more.
- Knowledge Base: Report about your help center activity including page views, article votes, and more.
- Search: Reports about the searches that users performed and the terms they searched for in your knowledge base.
- Community: Reports on the activity in your community forums, including the number of posts and comments, upvotes and downvotes, community members, and more.
Zendesk live chat and messaging datasets
The following datasets can be used to produce reports based on your usage of live chat and messaging:
- Engagement: Reports about your customer engagement using Chat.
- Chat concurrency: Reports about your agents’ handling of concurrent chat engagements.
- Messaging tickets: Reports about all messaging channels, including web, mobile, and social messaging channels. This information includes number of tickets, resolution times, satisfaction, and more.
Zendesk Sell dataset
The following datasets can be used to produce reports based on your usage of Zendesk Sell:
- Sales: Reports about your sales pipeline using Sell.
- Calls: Reports on your Zendesk Sell sales calls, such as incoming and outgoing calls, call time, and more.
- Products: Reports on your product sales, such as how many products were sold over time or which products sold the most.
- Activities: Reports on Sell activity volume and sales team contribution, including number of emails, calls, tasks, appointments, and visits.
Zendesk Answer Bot datasets
The following datasets can be used to produce reports based on your usage of Zendesk Answer Bot:
- Article Recommendations: Reports on the performance of help center articles automatically recommended to customers.
- Flow Builder: Reports on bot performance across Zendesk channels.
Choosing a dataset
To access you business information, you must choose a dataset. To help you understand the information you can report about from each dataset, see Understanding Explore datasets. You can choose the dataset you want to use before you create reports, or while you create a report.
Choosing a dataset before you create a report
To choose a dataset from the datasets library
- In Explore, click the Datasets icon (
).
- On the Datasets library page, select the product dataset you want to use. The
prebuilt, original dataset names display the status Default, and should be used
whenever possible.
If a dataset displays the status Out of date, it is no longer being updated by Zendesk. Unless you are maintaining reports that use this dataset, consider deleting it.
The page for the dataset you chose opens. From here, you can select an existing report or create a new report.
Choosing a dataset when you create a report
To choose a dataset while you create a report
- In Explore, click the reports icon (
).
- In the Reports library, click New report.
- On the Select a dataset page, select the Zendesk product you want to create
reports for.
- Next, select a specific dataset within that Zendesk product. For example, Zendesk
Support contains different datasets for tickets, updates, SLAs, and backlog
history.
When you select a dataset, the Dataset panel appears on the right. This panel allows you to select the Dataset version: either the default version of the dataset (most common) or a custom version. You can also see which metrics the dataset includes, which helps you determine that you're selecting the right dataset before you start creating your report.
- Finally, click Start report.
The report builder opens using the dataset you chose. You can now begin to create your report.
Creating a new dataset
In some circumstances, you might want to create your own dataset, for example, if you want to experiment with the data structure, or practice working with custom formulas. If you create your own dataset, formulas and reports from the original dataset will not be available. For most purposes, choose from one of the built-in datasets.
To create and connect to a new dataset
- Click the Datasets icon (
).
- In the Datasets library, click New dataset.
- On the Select a source page, choose the product you want to create reports for.
- On the New dataset page, enter a name for your new dataset, and then choose the source data that you want to query, for example, Tickets.
- Click Done.
The report builder opens using the dataset you chose. You can now begin to create your report.
More dataset operations
Explore offers further options for managing your datasets. The available options might differ depending on the level of permission you have to the dataset. For example, you can't delete the pre-built datasets.
To access the dataset operations
- Click the Datasets icon (
).
- In the Datasets library, choose a dataset and then click the options menu next to
it.
- From the options menu, choose one of the following:
- New report from this: Opens a new report using the selected dataset.
- Edit: Opens the dataset configuration page where you can change the name of the dataset and review the product it is using.
- Rename: Enables you to change the name of the dataset.
- Clone: Creates a copy of the selected dataset.
- Delete: Deletes the selected dataset.
17 Comments
Any update on the feature to join multiple datasets, or at least the ability to use more than one dataset when building a query? It would be really helpful for us, as we had a few queries in Insights that did not have this restriction, and we can't really replicate them in Explore the way we want to.
Second the ability to join multiple data sets, especially now with the guide data set. We are unable to calculate a self-service score without requestor data. Thanks!
@Spencer, What are you trying to measure in your report. Can you explain more about the self-service score? and requestor data?
Hi,
Can someone explain to me why anyone would want to duplicate a dataset? Doesn't that open the door for possibly having conflicting reports if a person splinters off the main dataset and starts making their own queries from it?
Does a duplicated dataset continue to have the same new data as the original it was copied from?
Hi James McCoy, thanks for the question. I think the main use for cloning a dataset is for testing purposes, for instance if someone wants to create a bunch of custom metrics and attributes that might not be ready for prime-time yet. If you restrict other agents from using that dataset that you can continue to develop until you have your queries correct. You're correct however, you don't want people getting confused about which dataset is which.
I see in the comments above that 4 years ago it was in the product queue to allow queries across data sets. Did this ever happen? I need to be able to create a report that totals up customer interactions (i.e inbound calls, outbound calls, chats, inbound:outbound emails, web form submissions) and while I can do each of these with individual queries and put them on a dashboard, I see no way to total them without exporting the data and manually tallying the results.
+1 for needing the ability to create queries across datasets!
We are implementing Chat on a phone-only based team, so I want to be able to track the number of inbound calls and number of chats served for that specific group as one metric.
+1
If you're looking to allow the creation of queries across datasets, please upvote and add your use cases to the following product feedback post – thanks! Create Query from two different datasets
We also need the ability to query across Datasets. We often run into issues with being unable to adequately query due to the datasets being separate. Currently, I'm trying to find the Time Spent on a particular type of ticket, but I can't isolate the type of ticket in the updates dataset and I can't view the time spent in the support dataset.
Thanks!
I'm trying to do something which would presumably be very simple, but I don't think it is possible. I am trying to build a single report/pie chart that shows volumes of inbound contacts by channel (in our case voice, email, and chat). Doing this using the 'Support - Tickets' dataset leaves out any calls that didn't create a ticket (disconnected/abandoned calls... and though we can change the setting to create tickets for every abandoned call, that seems like a poor and unnecessary option to enable better reporting).
We're also not able to filter these contacts by relevant metadata (e.g. 'Call direction' in order to omit outbound contacts on voice) using only 'Support - Tickets' available data.
That's right, that is currently not possible as the data that you need to report on are in separate datasets. If you can, I recommend that you also upvote and post to the product feedback thread that Dave mentioned above – Create Query from two different datasets. Thanks Robert!
Is there a way to get an export of the out of box datasets, or can you only export reports?
I need to be able to query against two datasets (I've already upvoted the link mentioned in this thread), and also want to be able to use other visualization tools, including to conditionally highlight (https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408819953818/comments/5003965656474). I'll ultimately likely needs to display things in an external dashboard that draws data from other systems, too.
I'm afraid there isn't a way to export the datasets directly from Explore. You can try exporting via the API (see API Reference; Incremental Exports); essentially, the data available in Explore are pulled from these endpoints.
Hi! Is there any way that I can create a custom dataset, filter it to a particular group, and data showing only that filtered group can be seen by people I share it with (so they can build reports for it but not see other groups' information).
Unfortunately, this is not possible in Explore. When cloning datasets, all metrics and attributes (including custom ones) are copied. There's no option to exclude some elements from being cloned, or limit access to data of certain users within a dataset.
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