Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
Filters decide what is counted. They are part of the definition of the number, not tidying applied afterwards.
Add one
- Open the report. It needs at least one metric before a filter means anything.
- In the Filters panel, click Add, pick the attribute and click Apply.
- Click the attribute you just added and select the values to keep. The panel shows the first hundred, so search rather than scroll when the list is long.
- Click Apply and check how much the total moved.
An attribute in Columns or Rows can be filtered the same way by clicking it. The difference is what the reader sees: a filter in the Filters panel does not appear in the visualisation, while one on a column or row does.
Watch the total change
Note the number before and after. A filter that removes eighty per cent of your tickets is doing more than you probably intended, and this is how you notice.
The filters most reports need
- A date range, always.
- Excluding spam or suspended tickets, which otherwise inflate volume.
- Brand or group, where a dashboard is for one team.
- Excluding test tickets, if your team makes them.
Exclude rather than include, usually
A filter listing the six groups to include stops being right the moment a seventh group is created, and it fails silently by leaving them out. Excluding what you do not want keeps working.
Filtering on a field that is often empty
Filtering to a value also removes every ticket where the field was never set. That can be most of them, and the report will look precise while covering a fraction of the data.
Check how many tickets have the field at all before filtering on it.
Write the filters into the title
"Tickets solved, excluding spam" rather than "Tickets solved". Two reports differing only by a filter are indistinguishable on a dashboard otherwise, and somebody will quote the wrong one.
Report filters and dashboard filters differ
One is built into the report; the other is chosen by the reader. Anything that defines the number belongs in the report, not in a control the reader can change. Zendesk gives the same rule from the other side: put most filters on the dashboard so you can change them without editing reports, and keep at report level only what is fixed or fundamental to the design.
With one catch. A dashboard filter overrides the report's filter on the same attribute. So a report filter sets the default rather than locking the number down, and if a figure must never move, the answer is not only to filter it in the report but also to keep that attribute off the dashboard's filter bar.
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