| Announced on | Rollout on |
| May 11, 2022 | June 2, 2022 |
What’s changing and why?
As part of our plan to support our customers as well as the future of Explore, we’re preparing to retire the following live metrics:
- Support - New tickets
- Support - Open tickets
- Support - Pending tickets
- Support - On-hold tickets
- Support - Solved tickets
These metrics are all-time metrics, meaning they hold the total number of tickets for the specified status for all time. When it comes to real-time reporting, all-time metrics don’t provide meaningful insight into an organization’s current performance.
With that in mind, we’re pivoting to use time-bound live metrics instead. These time-bound metrics, which are already available, give you the number of tickets in the specified status within the last 30 or 60 minutes, along with the difference as compared to the previous 30 or 60 minutes. With these metrics, you’ll see more meaningful numbers about how your organization’s ticket volume is evolving in real time.
In the example below, 70 tickets were submitted in the past 30 minutes. The red variation indicator tells you that this is 73 fewer tickets than were submitted in the 30 minutes before that.
The following time-bound live metrics are available:
- Support - New tickets (30min)
- Support - New tickets (60 min)
- Support - Open tickets (30min)
- Support - Open tickets (60min)
- Support - Pending tickets (30min)
- Support - Pending tickets (60min)
- Support - On-hold tickets (30min)
- Support - On-hold tickets (60 min)
- Support - Solved tickets (30min)
- Support - Solved tickets (60min)
For more information on reporting on live data, see Live data widgets for Explore dashboards.
Additionally, we’ll be replacing the all-time metrics with the 30-minute time-bound metrics for the corresponding ticket statuses on the default live dashboard.
What do I need to do?
If you use only the Explore default live dashboard, no action is needed on your part. The all-time metrics on the default dashboard will be automatically replaced with the 30-minute time-bound live metric for the same ticket status.
If you use any of the all-time metrics listed above in any of your custom live dashboards, you will need to replace them with one of the time-bound alternatives. See Adding live data and live filter widgets to dashboards.
Optionally, if you want to report on all-time totals, you can still do so by using the following non-live metrics in the Support: Tickets dataset:
- New tickets
- Open tickets
- Pending tickets
- On-hold tickets
- Solved tickets
For instructions, see Explore recipe: Creating KPIs for tickets by status.
How often the non-live metrics are refreshed depends on your Suite or Explore plan. For details, see Data refresh intervals for Explore reporting.
21 Comments
Being able to see actual volumes in real time has been extremely helpful, and I am not sure a 'by hour' trend is really that helpful without also seeing the total volume. If I look at the total at 9am and it's 1000 and I look again at 10am and it's 900 I know we are making progress. Now with this metric I may look at 9am and see 10 and at 10am see 20 and think we are in bad shape but really overall we've gone down in total even though that snapshot trended upward.
I can understand maybe sunsetting 'on hold' ,'solved' , and 'pending' because those do not really need action (in a longer timeframe a high 'pending' or 'on hold' might be a staffing concern but it is not immediate). In contrast 'new' and 'open' give really meaningful insight to managers on how much active work their team is handling.
I'm a little confused - let me playback...
When you say New tickets (30 mins) = 4 tickets
IS this showing me that as of 30 mins ago there were 4 Tickets at the time in New status?
OR
IS this showing me that in the last 30 mins there were 4 tickets created in that time frame?
If the former - ok fine.
I very much hope it's not the latter as we have our custom queries built around visibility on current view/queue health (or very near).
We need reporting of all tickets currently broken down by statuses (at least those unsolved).
Support Views wont suffice and the 30 min New tickets (again - if the latter) are covered by tickets created in the updates dataset anyway.
If this is to lessen processing power on querying #tickets - build in query limitations another way...
Such as Tickets created within Last 1 year tickets dataset and an ALL tickets dataset (make the ALL openly painfully slower or control times used in a year).
OR Maybe only allowing that #tickets query with date filter or on unsolved tickets only.
Maybe also stop auto querying while we build custom reports, the amount of time I rush to hit cancel in the middle of a query build while adding components because I plan to build my time filter into my dashboard (with bookmark default of a very short period)...
Hey most of the time, I don't want to query 10 years of tickets either!
This is unfortunate. The all-time New & Open counts have been very helpful to see real-time ticket counts of our Group-based Views in Support.
I'm really confused about all this.
We have custom dashboards and queries and all the information we get is about the current week and not days or minutes. How did we get into this situation?
Will we need to get the results hourly so we don't lose information?
That's unfortunate. I liked having a self-updating status on the current ticket situation. The time-bound metrics are not really that informative.
I use this to have a quick snapshot of how many tickets are currently opened for group X.
I am onZendesk Suite Enterprise, what is the alternative?
The little warning message "new versions of metrics available" when I am in edit mode in a dashboard makes me unable to scroll to the bottom where the "export" button is. How can I solve that?
Olá a todos !
Nós não temos acesso ao painel tempo real e trabalhamos com os painés customizados, com as métricas mencionadas de abertos, resolvidos, pendentes etc, que levam em média de 1 hora a 2 horas para migrar do Suporte para o Explorer. Para o nosso cenário vamos perder a funcionalidade de criar relatórios de x tickets de x filtro por mês, dia ou semana ?
Gostaria de saber pois ficou confuso se irá impactar somente neste dashboard em tempo real, que tem custo extra ou outro plano para utilizar.
Grato !
Nice to see that further thought is being given to reporting Live data. I just find it a pity that the way of making data available is replaced instead of added.
Personally, I think this is a serious shortcoming with respect to serving the paying users that this modification of presenting the live data makes the current live reports/dashboards no longer possible.
I would like to see the actual live amount of tickets in the different statuses added back to the Live Data presentation.
Thanks for the reply John Costello!
Ideally, it should be possible to cover the timespan until you can get the daily data, so:
- # of active tickets right now (per status, except closed)
- tickets in the past 9, 12, 24 hours.
Another Zendesk announcement, another feature cut. SMH.
Hi! Any way to have live dashboard for tickets arrived during the whole working day? (9 or 24 hours)?
30-60 minutes is really not that useful.
Hello
If a metric is deleted, even if you display a message on the affected dashboards, it is not enough for the administrators to know which queries to update.
The best would be to have a view in the queries tab with the list of all impacted queries (whatever the dashboards). It would be much easier to identify the updates made! Especially if more deletions are to come... it will quickly become a nightmare to maintain!
John Costello
Can we have a follow up to customers that may use the older metrics in custom queries, so the end user doesn't have to search through them to figure out what needs to be changed?
CC Ana Jones
John Costello, ah I see, if they aren't relevant for custom queries, then I think we're in the clear from my end. Thanks.
Hi All,
John here again - Charlie Tranen thanks for bringing this to my attention. We just rolled out a fix today that should resolve this issue. You should have access to the Export button from now on in Editor mode.
For those of you a little confused by this announcement - I can confirm that this retirement will only affect the Live Data versions of these Metrics and not the Historic versions they will continue to function.
Richard Rijo Almeida I don't speak Portuguese however Google translate helped me understand your question. I hope the above statement helps clarify what is going away.
We also have reviewed and changed our notification message to be clearer on what's retiring on June 2nd and to avoid further confusion. This new messaging will be live later this week.
Thank you so much for your feedback, you help make us better.
Best Regards
John
Muito obrigado pelo rápido retorno John Costello
Hi Jimmy Rufo
John Costello here, these Support Live metrics are pre-made and can't be used in custom queries. Do you mean on custom Dashboards?
If that's the case from June 2nd we will have an informational message in the Support metrics bring retired with a link referring how to replace it.
Let me know if that answers your question ?
John
Will this impact metrics in the Updates history dataset, as all our queries containing the Tickets Solved metric are displaying as 0 at the moment?
Hi Mark Ganusevič
Thanks for that feedback and to answer you yes we do have plans. Once we retire global metrics we will be providing much more time windows beyond 30 and 60 to introduce 4 hours and 8 hours.
Would you have an order of preference Mark of time windows in realtime for Support tickets ?
Regards
John
Hi C.W. Holeman III
We have retired these premade Support metrics as we believe there is more value for customers in the time-bound ticket status metrics of 30 and 60 mins for customers in real-time.
Was there a Use case you had in mind that we are now going to cause an issue for?
I would love to learn more.
John
Please sign in to leave a comment.