Exporting data to a JSON, CSV, or XML file

Fastpath: Admin Center > Account > Tools > Reports

Important: Data export must be enabled by Zendesk for your account. To enable this option, your account owner can contact Zendesk Customer Support. 

When data export is enabled, you can export data to a JSON, CSV, or XML file. Export generates fresh data each time you export. You cannot run multiple exports for the same type of data (tickets, organizations, users) at the same time.

Note: The export process can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to several hours, depending on the requested export date range and your account's level of ticket activity. If you have concerns about a particular export that you're waiting for, contact Zendesk Customer Support.

You must be an administrator to export data.

This article contains the following sections:

• Enabling and disabling data export
• Exporting your data to a downloadable file
• Understanding the data export options

Related articles:

• Exporting a view to a CSV file
• Exporting a ticket view to a CSV file with Python

Enabling and disabling data export

Important: To protect the data in your Zendesk, data export is not automatically enabled in all accounts. If you do not have this feature, contact Zendesk Customer Support to activate it.

When data export is enabled, administrators in a specific email domain can export data from Zendesk. The account owner's email domain is used as the default, but the account owner can change the domain if necessary.

To enable data export in your Zendesk

• Contact Zendesk Customer Support. Be sure to include your Zendesk Support subdomain name.

To change the email domain for admins to export data

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Tools > Reports.

   If necessary, click the Export tab to display data export options. Some legacy versions of Zendesk show export options on a separate tab.

   Note: You will not see the export option unless you have contacted us to enable data export.
2. Replace the domain in Approved email domain

   For example, mycompany.com.

   

   If you do not put any value in this field, the ability to export data will not be limited to admins with permission in a specific domain. In that case, any Zendesk Support admin will be able to export data, regardless of their email domain. If you include a value here, admins must sign in using the approved email domain to use the data export option.

3. Click Save.

To disable exports for data

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Tools > Reports.

   If necessary, click the Export tab to display data export options. Some legacy versions of Zendesk show export options on a separate tab.

2. Click Disable exports.

   

3. Click Ok to confirm.

Exporting your data to a downloadable file

You can export data to a JSON, CSV, or XML file to get a snapshot of the data at the moment you select that option.

When you request a file, a background job starts and you are notified via email when it's complete. You can then download a zip file containing the data report(s). The download link is valid for at least 3 days.

When you export data to an XML file, the resulting ZIP file is a ZIP32 file. However, for JSON and CSV exports, the file is a ZIP64 file instead, which is used to efficiently support JSON and CSV data sets larger than 4GB. See Announcing an improvement for large data exports.

The exported files contain the same data that you can access with the Zendesk API. For example, the data in the Users report is the same data that is returned using the GET command to access user data with the Zendesk REST API: Users. For more information see:

• Zendesk REST API: Users.
• Zendesk REST API: Tickets.
• Zendesk REST API: Incremental Exports.

To export data to a downloadable file

1. In Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, then select Tools > Reports.

   If necessary, click the Export tab to display data export options. Some legacy versions of Zendesk show export options on a separate tab.

   If you are an admin on an account with data export enabled, but you do not see this option, it might be because you have email domain restrictions set up and you are not signing in from an approved email domain.

2. Select an export option.
   • For JSON exports, select the date range and type of data to export, then click Export.

     JSON export is recommended for accounts with more than 200,000 tickets. Accounts with more than 1 million tickets are downloaded in JSON format only in 31-day increments.

   • For CSV or XML exports, click Request file beside the appropriate export option.

   For more details on the export options, see Understanding the data export options.

   

3. A background job is started and you are notified via email when it's complete.
4. Click the link in your email notification to download a zip file containing the report.

   The download link is valid for at least 3 days.

   If you have not received the email notification, you can click latest beside Full JSON export, CSV export, Full XML export, or User XML export to download the most recently generated report. The latest report displays your account data from the file you last requested, not your current account data. See Delays in receiving the email with the downloadable data export file for more information.

Understanding the data export options

You can request and download each of the following data reports:

Note: CSV and JSON exports are not available in sandbox accounts.

Full JSON export

Exports full data as a list of objects in JSON format. The JSON export enables you to export most data from your Zendesk account including ticket, user, and organization information. Accounts with more than 1 million tickets are downloaded in JSON format in 31-day increments.

Zendesk exports your data in "NDJSON" or Newline Delimited JSON. This format enables systems to stream in JSON objects one at a time, rather than read the entire file at once. This is helpful for extremely large export files (such as Zendesk exports), which may be too much for a traditional JSON viewer.

More information about NDJSON.

If you want a single JSON file containing all of your information rather than a streaming version, you’ll need to wrap the objects in an array, and comma-separate each line.

• Example: Support exported the following objects:

  {"ticket":{"id":....}}
  {"ticket":{"id":....}}
  {"ticket":{"id":....}}

  To create a valid JSON file, you’d wrap the objects into an array as follows:

  {"tickets":[ 
  {"ticket":{"id":....}}, 
  {"ticket":{"id":....}}, 
  {"ticket":{"id":....}}
  ]}

  The date ranges for these exports use a system-generated timestamp. Typically, these timestamps match the most-recent update recorded on the ticket, user, or organization (not the creation date). There are some cases where system updates don't generate ticket events. In these cases, you may see a few unexpected tickets in the output.
  With JSON export, if the amount of data being exported from a ticket is more than 1 MB, comments for the ticket are not included in the JSON file. The resulting downloadable ZIP file includes these two JSON files:

  • A JSON file that includes all of the tickets that you exported, including tickets that exceeded the 1 MB limit and exported without comments.
  • A JSON file that includes the tickets that exceeded the 1 MB limit and an error message letting you know that the reason the comments were not included was because you exceeded the 1 MB limit. For example:

    

CSV export

Exports ticket data in CSV format. Does not include deleted tickets, ticket comments, or ticket descriptions.

Note: The CSV export converts all date and time values to the account’s default time zone (at the time of the export). The dates displayed in the CSV file may not match the dates in the JSON export (UTC) or in Explore, which displays the user’s time zone. For more information about an account's time zone, see Setting time zone and format for Zendesk Support.

With CSV export, if the amount of data being exported from a ticket is more than 1 MB, the ticket doesn’t export. It isn’t included in the resulting CSV file. However, typically, this never happens since CSV exports do not include ticket comments, which are usually the largest data component in a ticket.

See Understanding which ticket data is in the CSV export for the ticket data included in CSV exports.

Full XML export

Exports data in XML format. The file includes:

• Accounts, which is all the settings for your account
• Entries, which is all the content added to your forums (including comments). This is a legacy Zendesk feature. For most accounts, data export will not include entries.
• Forums, which is detailed information about your forums. This is a legacy Zendesk feature. For most accounts, data export will not include forums.
• Groups, which is detailed information about your groups
• Organizations, which is detailed information about your organizations
• Tickets, which are all the details (including comments) for all tickets
• Users, which is the list of all your users (end-users, agents, and administrators).

Note: Full XML export is not available for accounts with more than 200,000 tickets. Use Full JSON export instead.

User XML export

Exports user data in XML format. The file includes:

• Groups, which is detailed information about your groups
• Organizations, which is detailed information about your organizations
• Users, which is the list of all your users (end-users, agents, and administrators).

Important: When you export user or organization data for XML reports, tags are included, but custom user fields and custom organization fields are not. To retrieve custom user fields, use this API endpoint. To retrieve custom organization fields, use this API endpoint.

Understanding which ticket data is in the CSV export

The ticket data in the CSV export includes the data shown in the following table. Multi-line text and multi-select fields, as well as custom date fields, are excluded from CSV exports, but can be included on full JSON and XML exports.

Data	Description
ID	The ticket number.
Requester	The name of the requester.
Requester ID	The requester's ID number.
Requester external id	The ID from an external system. Optional for accounts that have enabled Professional or Enterprise single sign-on using JWT or SAML.
Requester email	The requester's primary email address. If you want to export a list of users' secondary email addresses, you must use the List Users API endpoint while side-loading identities (for example: GET /api/v2/users.json?include=identities).
Requester domain	The email domain of the requester's primary email address.
Submitter	The name of the initial submitter. The requester's name is displayed if the requester submitted the ticket. If an agent submitted the ticket on behalf of the requester, the agent's name is used. If requester is changed, the submitter does not change.
Assignee	The assignee at the time of export.
Group	The group at the time of export.
Subject	The subject of the ticket.
Tags	The tags added to the ticket at time of export.
Status	The status at time of export
Priority	Priority at the time of export.
Via	The ticket channel from which the ticket originated.
Ticket type	The type at the time of export.
Created at	The original creation time and date. Displays in the account's time zone.
Updated at	The time and date of the most recent update. Displays in the account's time zone.
Assigned at	The time and date of the most recent agent assignment (i.e. the time it was assigned to the current assignee). Displays in the account's time zone.
Organization	The organization of current requester (if any).
Due date	The due date at the time of export. Displays in the account's time zone.
Initially assigned at	The time and date of first assignment to an agent (not to a group). Displays in the account's time zone.
Solved at	The time and date of the final or most recent change to solved status. Displays in the account's time zone.
Resolution time	The final or most recent resolution time in hours, rounded to the nearest whole hour.
Satisfaction Score	The current satisfaction rating status (Not Offered, Offered, Good or Bad).
Group stations	The number of group assignment changes made. The initial assignment upon ticket creation also counts as a station.
Assignee stations	The number of agent assignment changes made. The initial assignment upon ticket creation also counts as a station.
Reopens	The number of times a ticket has been changed from Solved to Open (whether by agent or end-user).
Replies	The number of public agent replies on a ticket to a comment from an agent or end user.
First reply time in minutes	The time between ticket creation time and the timestamp of the first public agent comment, displayed in minutes.
First reply time in minutes within business hours	Same as above, but only time that elapses during listed business hours is counted.
First resolution time in minutes	The time between ticket creation time and the timestamp of the first change of status to solved, displayed in minutes.
First resolution time in minutes within business hours	Same as above, but only time that elapses during listed business hours is counted.
Full resolution time in minutes	The time between ticket creation time and the timestamp of the final or most recent change of status to solved, displayed in minutes.
Full resolution time in minutes within business hours	Same as above, but only time that elapses during listed business hours is counted.
Agent wait time in minutes	The total time spent in the Pending status, displayed in minutes.
Agent wait time in minutes within business hours	Same as above, but only time that elapses during listed business hours is counted.
Requester wait time in minutes	The combined total time spent in the New and Open statuses. If the ticket is reopened after being solved, time spent in Solved status is counted as well. Time after final change to Solved status is not included.
Requester wait time in minutes within business hours	Same as above, but only time that elapses during listed business hours is counted.
On hold time in minutes	The total time spent in the On-hold status, displayed in minutes.
On hold time in minutes within business hours	Same as above, but only time that elapses during listed business hours is counted.