I've been asked to create an escalation workflow to send a critical alert notification to our IT Team. I will be looking for certain keywords like “Network error”, “not working”, etc. I've got that part. I need to identify these issue types repeated during a certain time period. If these conditions are met, I would execute a notification sending a message to our IT Team. For example if we receive 10 network errors within an hour, I would send the notification to IT. My challenge is how to keep track of these occurrences with specific thresholds and believe that I would execute an automation since it is time-based. Any recommendations on how to have a counter to see if these conditions exists, if so take the appropriate action. If not, reset the counter back to zero. I've been analyzing on the best practice how to approach this workflow. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
Critical Alerts to IT Team
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Thanks for sharing your detailed use case. To achieve this kind of time-based threshold alerting in Zendesk, I recommend leveraging Triggers combined with Custom ticket fields and Automations.
Here’s a suggested approach:
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If you expect to monitor across multiple tickets rather than within one ticket, consider using Zendesk Explore reports combined with a third-party notification tool (like PagerDuty or Slack integrations) to alert the IT team based on aggregated ticket data.Custom Field for Counting Incidents: Create a numeric custom ticket field (e.g., "Network Error Count") that tracks the number of occurrences within the ticket or linked tickets.
Trigger to Increment Counter: Set up a trigger that fires when a ticket contains the keywords like “Network error” or “not working,” which increments your custom counter field.
Time-based Automation: Use an automation that runs periodically (e.g., every hour) to check if the custom counter field has reached your threshold (10 in your example). If the threshold is met, send the notification to the IT team and reset the counter.
Ticket Tagging or Fields to Reset: To reset the counter, either clear or reset the custom field after notification sending.
You may also want to look into the Zendesk Event Target or Webhook functionality to integrate more complex logic if needed.
Best of luck with setting this up.