Some support teams never delete tickets; they instead move them through their workflow to close them using an automation. You can, however, delete a ticket if you want. Deleted tickets are moved into a Deleted Tickets view, where you can restore them or permanently delete them. After 30 days deleted tickets are permanently deleted and removed from the Deleted Tickets view.
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Deleting a ticket
If needed, you can delete a ticket. Deleted tickets are moved into a Deleted tickets view for 30 days, where you can restore them or permanently delete them.
You can also delete multiple tickets at the same time. For more information, see Bulk deleting tickets.
To delete a ticket
- Open the ticket that you want to delete.
- Click the Ticket options menu in the upper right, then select Delete.
The Ticket options menu looks slightly different in the Zendesk Agent Workspace (shown on the left) and the standard agent interface (shown on the right).
You'll be asked to confirm that you want to delete the ticket.
- Click OK to confirm that you want to delete the ticket.
The ticket is deleted and moved to the Deleted tickets view for 30 days until it is permanently deleted.
Undoing a ticket deletion
When you delete a ticket, you can quickly undo the deletion and recover the ticket if you need to.
- Click Undo in the message about the ticket deletion.
The message only displays for a few seconds. If you miss the option in the message, you can restore the deleted ticket from the Deleted Ticket view (see Restoring a deleted ticket).
Permanently deleting a ticket
Deleted tickets appear in a Deleted tickets view for 30 days. After that time, they are automatically permanently deleted.
If a ticket is in an archived state (greater than 120 days since marked as solved) before being deleted, it will not display in the deleted tickets view. By default, views do not display archived tickets.
You can manually permanently delete tickets before that time, if you want. If you do so, the ticket disappears from the Deleted tickets view, and there is no way to recover the permanently deleted ticket.
- Reporting overview: Deleted tickets are not excluded from the reporting overview. The ticket ID for a permanently deleted ticket is stored as a record, but no other information or ticket fields is stored for a permanently deleted ticket.
- Explore: Deleted tickets are excluded from most Explore reports by default. If you want to report on ticket deletion events, create a report in the Updates history dataset using the Activity > Deletions metric. SLA data from deleted tickets is also retained in the SLAs dataset.
To permanently delete a ticket
- Select the tickets you want to permanently delete.
A toolbar appears at the bottom of the list.
- Click Delete permanently.
- Confirm that you want to permanently delete the selected tickets.
You can't recover permanently deleted tickets. All attachments associated with the tickets are also deleted.Note: When you permanently delete a ticket, the record remains but all user-submitted content is scrubbed. As a result, scrubbed versions of deleted tickets still appear in the results of the Incremental Ticket Export API because the ticket records still exist. See Excluding deleted tickets in the developer docs.
23 Comments
Does deleting a ticket also delete any Satisfaction Rating submitted by the end-user via that ticket?
Hi there.
Do deleted tickets count towards stats in the Agent Updates Dashboard?
I ask as I was tracking my colleague's work during the day, and I noticed in my stats that I had solved three tickets for the day, yet I had only solved two. I had been testing the stats dashboard and there was a ticket I had created as a test and solved before deleting it completely, would this be it?
Deleted tickets are excluded from Explore reports by default, so yes, they'd be excluded from the Agent Updates dashboard. If you want to report about ticket deletion events, use a query from the Ticket updates dataset using the Activity > Deletions metric.
For more information, see Deleting tickets
Hi Dave.
Thanks, that makes sense. So in the example I mention above, that deleted ticket should not show in the solved ticket column? If so, then unsure why it showed as three solved tickets when it was only two not including that deleted ticket.
Are you still seeing this issue? I'm wondering if it just took some time for the Explore data up sync after the ticket was deleted. Alternately, you could use drill in to verify exactly which tickets were included in that total: Using drill in to refine your queries
Is there a way to automate bulk-deletion? We had an instagram integration import the entire history of the account (~15k tickets) and we did not want that to happen. It will be clunky to work around those tickets when looking at metrics, so we'd like to delete them.
There's definitely a way to delete ticket in Bulk. It will require the use of Bulk Delete Tickets API.
Hope this helps!
Hi Gavin. Yes, there is a way to delete tickets in bulk and create repetitive automation inside Zendesk in a simple way. You can try the GDPR Compliance app to create a target list of users or tickets to delete and add automation for a certain list for regular data processing.
I tried to leave this comment on the "Viewing and recovering deleted tickets" article, but was continually running into a 403 error telling me I didn't have permission, so I hope this is okay:
Hi Oli
If they are no longer in the deleted ticket view then yes it's because it has been more than 30 days. You can still view the deleted tickets but not in the Support UI. You can use API to create a list of deleted tickets instead: https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/ticketing/tickets/tickets/#list-deleted-tickets
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
Hi,
Can customers/users delete their own tickets? I've submitted a ticket as a customer, but cannot find a way to delete this (from the customer point of view).
I hope all is well! End users can not delete their own tickets, this can only be performed by authorized agents in the account.
I hope this answers your question!
Hello,
If I delete an organization, will the tickets assigned to it be deleted as well? If not, how could I link the (closed) orphaned tickets to a new organization?
Thanks.
Deleting an organization will not delete any users that were in that organization, nor will it delete any tickets belonging to that organization. See Deleting an organization for some caveats.
Closed tickets cannot be modified in any way, so their organization cannot be changed. One possible alternative solution would be to rename an obsolete organization (e.g., appending "-deleted" to the name). That way it will be clear to your agents that the organization is no longer in use, at least.
How can I exclude Calls in Explore Reports for ZD TALK that were recorded on deleted tickets?
The ticket ID is not included when I drill in, but the recorded calls are being included in my data for outgoing calls in my explore reports for ZD Talk.
I have created a ticket for you so we can investigate these calls in your Explore report.
Hi, as part of GDPR compliance, we keep up to 1 year worth of tickets and intend to use the API to automated the purging process.
But, we still want the historical statistic eg. ticket count trend over the years. Would the purging process result in the lost of all these statistic and hence, affect the reporting and trending?
Thanks!
"Deleted tickets are excluded from most Explore reports by default. If you want to report on ticket deletion events, create a report in the Updates history dataset using the Activity > Deletions metric. SLA data from deleted tickets is also retained in the SLAs dataset. "
More details can be found here:
Permanently deleting a ticket
When we delete ticket using the bulk delete API - https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/ticketing/tickets/tickets/#bulk-delete-tickets, does it gets permanently deleted or do we need to do something else to permanent delete tickets ?
Also does bulk delete API has any rate limiting associated with it ?
Hi Jainendra,
The bulk delete tickets API will soft delete tickets and to permanently delete them you need to follow it up with Delete multiple tickets permanently API.
Endpoints such as the Bulk Delete Tickets endpoint queue background jobs to do the work. You can have up to 30 queued or running jobs at once. If you exceed the limit, you will receive a "TooManyJobs" error. See: Job Limit.
Hope this helps.
Hello
I understand there is an option to manually delete a ticket.
However, it is a bit tricky when it comes to "deleting tickets for multiple users".
We have a case scenario where we will be deleting a few users from zendesk.
Deleting a user account - does not delete the ticket which then requires you to delete them manually.
Question is: how do we bulk delete ALL TICKETS from various users?
Just quickly tried to view a X user's tickets: of which majority ones are marked as closed.
It allows me to select only the outstanding tickets but not the closed ones?
We need to delete any possible tickets created by those users.
How do we tackle this case?
Thanks
You can use the Bulk Delete Tickets API endpoint to delete closed tickets or any tickets associated with a user you are deleting. Using this option means you are restricted to deleting 100 tickets at a time, however, if you have developer resources, the API can be leveraged in a script to run continuously in the background until all the tickets are deleted as well.
You can also visit the article How can I bulk delete closed tickets? for more information.
Hope this helps!
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