Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
Tags are reportable and awkward. A ticket can carry many, which breaks the arithmetic people expect.
Report on them
- Open a report on the ticket dataset.
- Add the tag attribute as a grouping, or filter on a specific tag.
- Compare the total against the ticket count.
The arithmetic problem
A ticket with four tags appears under all four. Group by tag and the column adds up to more than the number of tickets, which is correct and looks like an error to anybody reading it.
Say on the report that tickets can appear more than once.
Filtering works better than grouping
"How many tickets carry this tag" is a clean question. "Break my tickets down by tag" is not, because the categories overlap.
Where you want a clean breakdown, use a drop-down field instead. That is what fields are for.
Tags are only as good as the tagging
Applied by triggers and macros, they are consistent. Applied by agents choosing from memory, they are not: the same subject ends up under three spellings, and the report undercounts all of them.
Check the tag list first
Look at what tags exist and how often each is used before building anything. You will usually find near-duplicates, and merging them is a prerequisite rather than an improvement.
Tags are permanent in reporting
Removing a tag from the account does not remove it from historical tickets, and renaming produces two tags in the history. Trend reports on tags need this in mind.
When a tag deserves promotion
If you report on one tag regularly, it should probably be a field. Fields are validated, single-valued and reportable without caveats.
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