Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Explore access is off by default for everyone, admins included. The setting is called Analytics, which is why the error is hard to find.
Symptoms: what does the message say?
The message reads:
It looks like you don't have permission to access Analytics. Contact your Zendesk Administrator for details.
Note the word Analytics. The product is called Explore, the permission is called Analytics, and that mismatch is why searching for the message rarely lands anywhere useful.
- Explore is missing from the product menu entirely.
- Opening it produces the message above.
- A shared dashboard link is refused, but Explore itself opens.
That third one is a different problem with a different fix. If Explore opens at all, skip to the dashboard section below.
It is off by default, for everybody
Zendesk deactivates Explore access by default, and that includes admins and the account owner. Nobody has it until somebody switches it on, so a new account where nobody can open Explore is behaving exactly as designed.
This is the answer most of the time, and it is worth checking before investigating anything else. People assume an admin has everything, and here that assumption is wrong.
Resolution steps
- Open Admin Center and go to the role or the team member's profile.
- On the Roles and access tab, find Analytics.
- Tick the Access checkbox next to it.
- Have the person sign out and back in.
Without that checkbox nothing else matters. Whatever other permissions the role carries, Explore stays closed until Analytics is ticked.
Check the role rather than the person. Access is granted through the role, so somebody with wide permissions everywhere else can still have none here, and fixing it for one person by hand leaves the next colleague with the same problem.
They are an end user, not an agent
Explore is for agents and admins. Somebody created as an end user, which happens automatically when an account is made from an incoming email, cannot reach it at all and no checkbox will change that.
Check the user type before the role. Promoting them is a different action from granting a permission.
When only a dashboard is refused
A different message appears here, along the lines of the dashboard not existing or not being public. That means they can reach Explore but the dashboard was never shared with them.
Sending somebody the published URL does not grant access to it. The owner of the dashboard has to share it explicitly, and that is done in the dashboard's own sharing settings rather than in anybody's role.
Telling the two apart in one question
Ask whether they can open Explore at all.
- No. It is the Analytics permission on their role, or they are an end user.
- Yes, but not that dashboard. It is sharing, and the dashboard owner fixes it.
That one question saves the half hour otherwise spent looking at the wrong setting.
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