Chapter 9. Troubleshooting Zendesk

Almost every time we customize a system, it becomes more complex and therefore prone to error. When it comes to Zendesk, troubleshooting mainly consists of identifying the cause of unexpected behavior or dealing with overall performance issues.

While Zendesk's own support is great and will, most likely, locate and fix the problem for you, troubleshooting Zendesk yourself can save time and further your understanding of your setup.

In this chapter, we will highlight some of the most common issues and troubleshooting techniques. You will learn how to isolate problems and fix them accordingly.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Troubleshooting performance issues

• Troubleshooting business rules 

• Troubleshooting Zendesk apps

• Zendesk support

Troubleshooting performance issues

We've all had this problem before. We need to get work done, but everything is way slower than usual. The occasional slowdown in performance plagues any online service available.

But why? Let's take a look at the possible causes and what we can do about them.

Zendesk status

Before we start investigating our system and/or annoying our network administrators, we should check whether Zendesk is aware of any issues on their side.

We can do that by visiting the following website: https://status.zendesk.com/.

Zendesk has many data centers all over the world. This is why we will have to enter our subdomain in order to review the status of our "Pod":

As soon as we have provided our subdomain, the website will display the current and past status for up to one week:

While the status report is divided into seven easy to understand categories, we can dig deeper by clicking on them:

We can also stay up to date about major service incidents by following the Twitter account...

Troubleshooting business rules

Having to troubleshoot business rules is one of the most common scenarios when working with Zendesk.

How so?

With each new trigger and automation, we undoubtedly add to the complexity of our setup. An older trigger, for instance, may malfunction because we did not consider adjusting it after deleting a ticket field. The possibilities are endless.

At the same time, we may have created a bunch of new SLAs, which simply do not seem to work as expected. So, let's take a look at our options.

Triggers and automations

In most cases, trigger– or automation–related issues are reported in direct connection with a ticket. In other words, an agent finds a ticket and does not quite understand why it behaved the way it did.

Ticket events

In cases like the one mentioned earlier, we can review the ticket's history by looking at every event that took place since the ticket has been created.

In order to do so, simply click on Conversations on top of the ticket description and select...

Troubleshooting Zendesk apps

Troubleshooting Zendesk Apps is definitely a job for our developers, or more likely the developer of the app itself.

If the issue persists after reinstalling the app, we can find the developer's e-mail address in our app's general settings:

However, there is something we can do to help the developer understand the exact issue.

All modern web browsers come with developer tools. These tools can be used for a range of things, such as inspecting a website's HTML structure.

How does one open those tools?

Opening these tools varies depending on the browser and your OS. Here are some examples:

• Chrome: Ctrl + Shift + I

• Internet Explorer: F12

• Mac OS X: ⌘ + ⌥ + I

The developer tools will look something like this:

We are after the Console, which uses log diagnostic information during web development.

If our app does not work as expected, it is likely that we will find an error message in the console. When in doubt, we can simply copy the whole output and forward it to the...

Contacting Zendesk support

Last but not least, we always have the option to contact Zendesk's own support team.

We can contact the support by creating a ticket within their Help Center: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new.

Or we can contact their support by sending an e-mail to <[e-mail]>.

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to troubleshoot our Zendesk setup. We also looked at different ways that we can help third parties to understand our exact issue, which should result in faster support.

Over time, you will become better at spotting the cause of a problem within your setup. Do not become discouraged and never quash the idea of contacting Zendesk's support team.

In the next chapter, we will look at a range of tips and tricks that I have collected over my years of working with Zendesk.