Eugene Orman

Carmen,  I checked your ticket with our Support team, and they have provided more details now. I hope this addresses your concerns. 

Jon,  you have a valid point. For sure, there are some useful reports that look at the time ranges longer than 37 months. However, this is the trade-off we need to make to provide good performance and reliability.  Believe me, we considered and investigated many other solutions. Unfortunately, it is impossible to opt-out from this change per account basis because the data pruning mechanism is applied on the data source level that is account agnostic. 

I want to clarify this data point “only 2% of reports being filtered by the time ranges longer than 37 months”.  It refers to the report executions, so it means that only 2% of all report executions looked at time ranges longer than 37 months. For example, if you have a report filtered by 30 days but while using it in the dashboard, you filtered it by 4 years, this report execution is included in this 2%. I will pull the list of the reports that had a longer time range executed in your account and will send it to you via a proactive ticket. 

Eli, thank you for your feedback. Your account is indeed not large enough to experience the performance issues with Explore.  As mentioned above, it is impossible to opt-out from this change per account basis because of how the source data is stored.  

Sydney Neubauer Thank you for raising good questions. 

1. Only Explore admins have access to the Dataset Exports feature. This point is added to this article now.
2. All Explore admins have access to all active and recent exports. So, the access is per account.

3. There is no way to create the export on someone's behalf but any admin can download the export even if it was configured by someone else. 
4. Only the admin who created the export and the account owner will receive the email notification. The idea is to make the account owner aware of the dataset export. What do you dislike about this behaviour? 
 

Thank you for sharing your feedback. We understand that this adjustment may raise concerns, and we want to assure you that your input is invaluable to us.

We'd like to offer an important clarification: This data retention policy will solely impact data within the Explore analytics tool. Other Zendesk features like Agent workspace, Search, Help Center and APIs will not be impacted.
 
The decision to implement data retention in Explore was not made lightly. It was a careful decision aimed at enhancing the overall performance and reliability of the platform.  We observed up to 85% faster report execution times on the accounts with 37-month data retention. While everyone will experience improved performance and stability, accounts with higher volumes of data and longer history will likely see the most significant gains. This enhancement is crucial for providing a more efficient reporting experience for all users and enables Zendesk to continue enriching Explore with new data.
 
Our analysis shows that most users focus on recent data, with only 2% of the executed reports being filtered by the time ranges longer than 37 months. This supports our decision to introduce data retention for maintaining a high-quality reporting experience.
 
We appreciate your understanding and continued support as we strive to improve our product. Please continue to provide feedback and comments in this thread, we will respond in a timely manner. If you have technical concerns, please reach out to your Account Manager or a member of our Support team who would be glad to assist you. 
 
Thank you for being a valued member of our community and Zendesk customer.
 

We're excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of dataset exports in Explore. This feature makes exporting large volumes of data from Explore easier than ever.

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What’s changing and why?
• Who can use dataset exports?
• What do I need to do?

What’s changing and why?

Certain limitations apply to exporting reports or dashboards from Explore, such as a 50,000-row limit and a two-minute maximum run time. However, the new dataset exports feature allows you to export granular data from Explore datasets without these limitations.

You can export data from Explore datasets on a recurring or one-time basis. The exported datasets are made available as CSV files that you can download and integrate with your choice of third-party BI or analytics tools. Exporting datasets allows you to more easily combine Zendesk data with other data sources, giving you a more complete picture of your business operations.

These are the datasets that can currently be exported: 

• Answer Bot - Flow Builder
• Chat and Messaging - Engagement
• Chat and Messaging - Messaging tickets
• Guide - Knowledge Base
• Support - Tickets
• Support - SLAs
• Support - Updates History
• Talk - Calls

This functionality will be extended to other datasets in the future.

Watch the video below for an introduction to exporting Explore datasets.

Exporting datasets with Zendesk Explore (1:41)

For more information, see Exporting datasets from Explore.

Who can use dataset exports?

Dataset exports are available on Explore Professional, Explore Enterprise, Suite Professional and Suite Enterprise plans. They can be configured by administrators. 

What do I need to do?

You don’t need to take any action. If you’re using a supported plan, you can start using the new dataset exports right away.

If you have any feedback about this feature, please fill out this survey.

For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.

Zendesk is introducing a 37-month data retention limit for Explore starting July 7, 2025, to improve report loading speeds. 

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What is changing?
• Why is Zendesk making this change?
• How will the data retention be applied?
• What do I need to do?

What is changing?

Today, Explore reporting allows users to interact with all the data associated with their account from its origination. That’s why customers with longer tenures and large data sets experience slow performance when executing complex reports, even when date filters are applied. 

To best align our in-product experience with observed usage and boost report loading times, we’re introducing a 37-month limit on the data available in Explore.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Customers who voluntarily limited their data availability to 37 months experienced significant enhancements in the report loading speeds. The research showed that most Explore reports and dashboards are filtered by recent time ranges like last month or last week and rarely by time ranges longer than 12 months. Introducing a 37-month limit will provide a significant performance boost to reports with minimal negative impact on the overall reporting experience.

How will the data retention be applied?

A new background Explore process will remove closed tickets that were solved more than 37 months ago. This will impact most of the Support, Chat and Talk, and AI Intelligent triage datasets. For other datasets, like Guide or Answer Bot, we will remove all data recorded more than 37 months ago.  

User, organization, and custom object data will not be removed.

What do I need to do?

This change happens automatically after July 7, 2025, and any reports you have configured that use data longer than this new limit will no longer show data older than 37 months. Selecting a date range older than this limit in the reports or dashboards will not retrieve any results apart from unsolved tickets. 

If your organization relies on Explore to retrieve data older than 37 months, you can export your reports and dashboards that look at data older than 37 months before the limit is applied. You can also adapt your workflow and start consuming this historical data from other sources, such as:

• Searching in the Agent Workspace, 
• Exporting ticket and user lists from the  Admin Center data export feature, 
• Accessing the historical raw, unprocessed data from your account using the API. 

If you have feedback or questions about this announcement, visit our community forum, where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk Customer Support.

Hi everyone, 

We are planning to make the dataset exports feature generally available at the end of this year. However, if you want to join the Beta fill out this form - https://forms.gle/43GHPvYKsVXFsHweA

Thank you for sharing your feedback. Placing all values of one multi-select field into an array makes sense. It is something we considering for the Dataset Exporter. However, there are no plans to change the current behaviour for the Report and Dashboard exports. 

Thank you for sharing this feedback. I understand how reporting on business hours instead of calendar hours can improve your analyses.  

Implementing this functionality is technically very complex. It is something we can consider in future but we will not be able to add this feature to our roadmap this or next year. Please keep sharing your use cases and voting for this post if this functionality is important to you.

You also can create a report like this in the Knowledge Capture dataset:  

Although this dataset is not designed for this case it has the latest Article updated - Date attribute that you can use to filter and slice the data. The only thing you will need to do is to create a simple calculation like this, that counts article IDs: 

Thank you for all your great feedback. The ability to calculate the time duration between two custom events that occurred during the lifecycle of the ticket can be very insightful.  Unfortunately, the current data model of the Updates history dataset and calculations functionality can not provide this functionality. 

While we would love to address this issue, we cannot work on it this year.