zendesk_skill

Overview

This skill provides a practical wrapper around the Zendesk Support REST API for managing tickets, users, organizations, groups, and search operations. It focuses on shell-friendly examples and verified curl patterns to create, update, search, and automate common support workflows. Use it to integrate Zendesk actions into scripts, CI jobs, or automation tools.

How this skill works

The skill issues authenticated HTTPS requests to the Zendesk API using an API token and the -u curl flag (EMAIL/token:API_TOKEN). It exposes core operations: listing and paginating tickets, creating and bulk-creating tickets, updating and deleting tickets, managing users and organizations, group management, and powerful search queries. Examples use temporary JSON files and bash -c wrappers to preserve environment variables when piping to jq.

When to use it

• Automating ticket creation and routing from alerts or forms
• Bulk-creating or bulk-updating tickets as part of migrations
• Synchronizing user and organization records from another system
• Running scripted searches for reporting and cleanup tasks
• Assigning tickets to groups or agents via automation

Best practices

• Enable Token Access in Zendesk Admin and store credentials in environment variables
• Wrap curl commands with bash -c '...' when piping to jq to avoid losing env vars
• Use pagination parameters (page, per_page) for large result sets
• Test token validity with a safe endpoint (tickets.json or users.json)
• Use create_many and update_many endpoints for efficient bulk operations

Example use cases

• Create an urgent ticket from a monitoring alert and assign it to an on-call agent
• Bulk-close resolved tickets older than a threshold using search + update_many
• Provision end-users and agents from a CRM export into Zendesk
• Build a nightly report by searching open high-priority tickets and piping results to jq
• Automate organization creation and membership assignment during customer onboarding