Incremental API does not contain author data (author_id)

Problem

We are ingesting ticket information in bulk via the Zendesk incremental api (/api/v2/incremental/ticket_events.json?start_time={startTime}&include=metric_sets).The incremental ticket event API is not showing comment authors correctly for Messaging/Chat tickets. For example, when we pull the ticket events via the Zendesk incremental API (/api/v2/incremental/ticket_events.json?start_time={startTime}&include=metric_sets), comments are not assigned to an agent, but to user -1 which is a system user. We need to be able to see within the data which agent made comments, not just that they were made by the system.

Impact

Without this data available within the incremental ticket event API, we are unable to import data about which agent made the comment which is critical information for our reporting.

Potential Solution

Zendesk has suggested iterating through each ticket via  the comment_events API (sideloading) which will provide the author_id but this will increase API calls significantly and the cost may outweigh the benefit and add unnecessary load to our servers importing the data.