Rule Analysis is a great feature in Zendesk that lets you understand your business rules, sort them by what action they do, whether they use tags, etc.
I recently came across a scenario in Zendesk where I thought Rule Analysis would save the day, but I was left disappointed.
In this post, I'll show you how Salto can fill the gaps in this feature and help you understand what is going on in your Zendesk instance.
Use Case
Let's say I have a custom dropdown field called Support Level.
The business has now decided that we should use a multi-select dropdown instead, as it turns out that customers can have overlapping support levels (I know...).
So now I have to create a new field, go over all my automations, triggers, macros, etc. and replace the old field with the new one.
Rule Analysis only shows half the picture
And here's where I thought Rule Analysis was going to help me.Because this is a dropdown field, each value has a corresponding tag.
So I can go over the Rule Analysis tab and see where one of the field tags is being used.
This is a great start, except I'm not getting the whole picture. For example, I'm sure we use this field in SLAs and Routing Conditions, and we have even hardcoded its ID when using placeholders in macros and dynamic content.
Yet, I don't see any of those in the analysis.I'll have to go business rule by business rule, and see where the field is being used, whether it's by its name or its ID. And if I have multiple Zendesk instances where the field is replicated, then I know this will be a long-running task in my backlog.
Salto's Impact Analysis
With Salto, I can simply open up the field in question and see all the places where the field is used, including the areas not included in Rules Analysis.
We call this impact analysis. With this information, I can now understand the impact of making a change in this field or, in this case, replacing it with a new one.
That's it. Just like I saved dozens of hours. Now I can just go over those business rules, open them in Zendesk, and make the change.
Full-text search
What about where we hardcoded the field ID using placeholders?
Salto allows me to do a full-text search across my entire Zendesk configuration. I can simply take the field ID, drop it in the search bar, and find all the areas where it is used, like Dynamic Content and Macro emails.
And that's how easy it is to use Salto to really understand what is going on in your Zendesk instance.
