How to Generate Reports in Zendesk Easily 2026

Open the Zendesk products menu in the top bar and choose Analytics, then click the real-time monitoring home icon. The page groups live counts into Queues, Tickets and Agents: tickets waiting in queue, tickets opened in the last 24 hours, and available agents, each split by Email, Messaging and Voice.

Trend charts below track average time to first assignment, solved tickets and average full resolution time. The refresh rates differ by element.

Zendesk documents KPIs and tables as refreshing every 20 seconds, while charts covering the last several hours or days refresh once a minute. These dashboards are read-only, so you can filter them but not add your own metrics.

If your question is "what is happening right now", you may not need Explore at all. From here, View opens the Incoming tickets, Ticket progress or Agent productivity dashboard.

For a custom date range, a single agent, or a trend over weeks, go to Reports inside Analytics and click New report. Explore asks which dataset to use.

Support > Support - Tickets covers most ticket-volume and resolution questions, so pick it and click Start report. The report builder opens on an empty canvas with the dataset name in the top-left corner.

Explore's own empty state lays out the sequence: select metrics, slice by attributes and filters, choose a visualization, then save and add the report to a dashboard. You can also start a report from the Dataset library (hover the dataset, open its settings icon, choose New report from this) or from inside a dashboard in edit mode.

A metric is the number being counted: tickets, replies, first reply time. At least one is required.

Click Add under Metrics, tick the ones you want, and click Apply. Several metrics can sit on one report, so unassigned unsolved, assigned unsolved and total unsolved tickets can share a single chart.

Attributes decide how that number is broken up. Put a date attribute such as Ticket created - Date in Columns to plot the metric over time, and a category such as Assignee name in Rows to get one series per agent.

Explore also has an Explosions panel, which splits the result into a separate chart per value. If you don't type a report name, Explore generates one from the metrics and attributes, and reading it back is a quick check that you built what you meant to.

Add attributes to the Filters panel to narrow the report, for example to the last 30 days or to one channel. A report with no date filter covers all the ticket history in the dataset, which is rarely what anyone wants on a weekly dashboard.

Explore picks a visualization automatically based on what you added. Switch it from the visualization type menu to a table, bar, line or one of the other types without touching the metrics underneath.

Click Save in the top-right corner. Reports don't save automatically, so closing the tab before saving discards the work. To make a variation of an existing report without overwriting it, use Save as new instead.

Open Dashboards, click New dashboard, then Add > Add report and pick the report you saved. Drag to position and resize it, add any other reports, and use Share to give Zendesk groups access.

Changes to a dashboard only become visible to others after you click Publish. From a dashboard you can edit, you can schedule it to be emailed to agents, admins or groups as CSV, Excel, PNG or PDF, for up to 12 months at a time.

Zendesk caps each email at 25 MB and suggests not sending Image and PDF together on large dashboards. Explore's data sync can take up to two hours, so Zendesk recommends scheduling a full-day dashboard for 2 AM or later.