Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Support Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Keeping single sign-on working. Almost everything that breaks it is a date somebody did not write down.
Review it
- Open the authentication settings in Admin Center.
- Check which configurations are active, and for whom.
- Note the expiry of every certificate and secret.
- Confirm the fallback route is what you intended.
Expiry is the main cause of outages
A certificate or client secret expires and nobody can sign in, with no warning. It is entirely predictable and it still happens, because the date lives in a system nobody looks at.
Put every expiry in a shared calendar with a reminder a month ahead.
Staff and customers are separate
Check both. A change made for team members does not affect end users, and it is easy to test one and assume the other.
Watch what is still enabled
Zendesk passwords left on alongside single sign-on. It is usually a leftover from testing, and it means the account has a route in that your provider does not govern.
Test after any provider change
An upgrade, a migration, a policy change at the identity provider. Each can alter what is sent, and the symptom is sign-in failing for everybody on a Monday.
Keep a recovery plan
What happens if the provider is unavailable, or the configuration breaks. Who can still get in, and how. Decided in advance, because during an outage nobody can sign in to work it out.
Write it down
Which provider, who administers it, where the certificates come from, when they expire. This is the documentation your successor needs and the one nobody writes.
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