Exporting data to a JSON, CSV, or XML file (Professional and Enterprise)

Important: Data export must be enabled by Zendesk for your account. If you are on Professional or Enterprise and want to enable this option, your account owner can email support@zendesk.com.

When data export is enabled, you can export data as an activity report 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.

Data export is available on Professional and Enterprise plans. You must be an administrator or an Enterprise agent with permission to view and edit reports to export data.

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, including ticket, user, and organization information. Accounts with more than 1 million tickets are downloaded in JSON format only in 31-day increments.

If you want to import these JSON objects into another app, 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:

The date ranges for these exports use a system-generated timestamp. Typically, these timestamps match the most-recent update on the ticket. There are some exceptions for system updates that don't generate ticket events. In these cases, you may see a few unexpected tickets in the output.

CSV export: Exports ticket data in CSV format. Does not include deleted tickets, ticket comments, or ticket descriptions See the table below 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 information, tags are included, but custom user fields are not. To retrieve custom user fields, use this API endpoint.

Enabling and disabling data export

To protect the data in your Zendesk, data export is not automatically enabled in all accounts. If you do not have this feature, contact support@zendesk.com to activate it. You must be on Professional or Enterprise.

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

To enable data export in your Zendesk

Email support@zendesk.com. Be sure to include your Zendesk Support subdomain name.

To change the email domain for admins to export data

You will not see the export option unless you are on Professional or Enterprise and contacted us to enable data export.

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Manage > Reports.

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

Check with your account owner first before removing zendesk.com. The account owner can also remove this restriction.

Enter your 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 in a specific domain. In that case, any Zendesk Support admin will be able to export data, regardless of their email domain.

Click Save.

To disable exports for data

Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Manage > Reports.

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

Click Disable exports.

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.

These 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:

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

Select an export option. See the table below for more details.

For JSON exports, select the date range to be exported and the type of data to export (tickets, users, organizations), 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 on of the export options.

A background job is started and you are notified via email when it's complete.

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.

The ticket data in the CSV export includes the data shown in the following table. Multi-line text and multi-select 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.

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.

Updated at

The time and date of the most recent update.

Assigned at

The time and date of the most recent agent assignment (i.e. the time it was assigned to the current assignee).

Organization

The organization of current requester (if any).

Due date

The due date at the time of export.

Initially assigned at

The time and date of first assignment to an agent (not to a group).

Solved at

The time and date of the final or most recent change to solved status.

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 comments on a ticket (not end-users comments or private comments).

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.

Maybe not 100% relevant, but could be interesting for some other members here. If you want to export the help center there is no ready made solution yet.
You need to use the API and that can be challenging for many, luckily I already went through the effort so that others don't need to reinvent the wheel. Check out https://github.com/pjmuller/zendesk-helpcenter-export
It exports all of your categories, sections, articles and even attachments in a nested folder structure.
Enjoy! :)

Does the full XML export also pull out the attachments in tickets? Almost all of our tickets have attachments in them (Office documents or image files), and I am looking at exporting for our records management requirements.

Is there a way to have this export pull the suspended tickets? We need to have our marketing team review the hard bounces and the Suspended tickets UI is pretty brutal for searching. Being able to get it into a csv/xml/anything else would be much more efficient.

I'm really hoping this isn't yet another 'hire a developer to do it with the API' situation and that I'm just missing something obvious...

@Dan - Sadly you are correct in this case. The only way to get at your suspended tickets other than via the suspended tickets view is via API. The List Suspended Tickets endpoint is just a GET request so you can fire it off from your browser if you're logged into Zendesk. The output will be in JSON format instead of a csv or XML. That's going to be your best option at the moment.

We have got enabled data export feature on our zendesk. With this feature, we were aiming to export zendesk data to our other department for relevant data analysis but porblem we are facing is, it is exporting all the custom fields but it is not exporting date type custom fields and a multiple line text custom field in particular and this is completely defeating the purpose of having this export feature. Can you please let me know if it is like that or am I missing anything here ?? Thanks

We're looking at a weekly export of our feedback tickets (tagged) with comments to circulate with our non-Zendesk users in the business. Can you point me in the direction of the API documentation that would explain how to do that? Cant find any apps to do this neatly and I need to get our dev team to build something.

any suggestions on what to do with my newly exported XML user list? I would like to see a list of the users that i can perhaps even put into excel and filter, but what i have now is quite overwhelming, to say the least....

You should be able to import your XML file into Excel - you just need to do an XML Data Import, instead of opening it like a normal .xls file. If I understand it correctly (I've not tried it myself), Excel should take care of converting the file for you. Then you can manipulate it like any other Excel doc.

Why is the organization name not used? It's very inconvenient to have a bunch of organization ID numbers, which don't really mean anything...(I'm not even sure where to find the ID numbers in Zendesk).

You can then select a full XML export of your user data which includes organization information. I find odd that the file you received is not including Org names. If you have the issue also with the XML, please send us an email at support@zendesk.com with the file so we can have a look at it!

The XML export indeed contains organization information, but this information is in another file. However, in the User data file, only the organization code is displayed, but not the organization name.

What I have to do now is import the org name from the other XML file into the user XML file (using excel).

We've just received notice that this has been enabled, I see the Admin > Reports option now and have requested a User XML export file. I noticed above in support documentation it says there is an "Export" tab and info around "change the email domain for admins to export data" I'm not seeing this Export tab or anywhere to change email domain for export data. Is this no longer available? If it isn't, should documentation above be updated to reflect that? If it is available, any reason why we wouldn't see it?

Sorry for the delay here; hopefully this has been resolved! Most of the time in situations like this it's a caching issue, so if you refresh your browser it should show up. If you're still having trouble, let me know and I'll take a closer look for you!