Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer relationship management system that helps businesses automate and enhance customer support interactions. You can use Amazon Kendra to index your Zendesk support tickets, ticket comments, ticket attachments, help center articles, article comments, article comment attachments, guide community topics, community posts, and community post comments.
You can filter by organization name if you want to index tickets that are only within a specific organization. You can also choose to set a crawl date for when you want to start crawling data from Zendesk.
You can connect Amazon Kendra to your Zendesk data source using the Amazon Kendra console
For troubleshooting your Amazon Kendra Zendesk data source connector, see Troubleshooting data sources.
Supported features
Amazon Kendra Zendesk data source connector supports the following features:
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Field mappings
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User access control
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Inclusion/exclusion filters
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Change log, full and incremental content syncs
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Virtual private cloud (VPC)
Prerequisites
Before you can use Amazon Kendra to index your Zendesk data source, make these changes in your Zendesk and AWS accounts.
In Zendesk, make sure you have:
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Created a Zendesk Suite (Professional/Enterprise) administrative account.
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Noted your Zendesk host URL. For example,
https://{sub-domain}.zendesk.com/
.Note
(On-premise/server) Amazon Kendra checks if the endpoint information included in AWS Secrets Manager is the same the endpoint information specified in your data source configuration details. This helps protect against the confused deputy problem, which is a security issue where a user doesn’t have permission to perform an action but uses Amazon Kendra as a proxy to access the configured secret and perform the action. If you later change your endpoint information, you must create a new secret to sync this information.
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Set up 0Auth 2.0 Authentication :
In Admin Center, navigate to Apps and integrations > APIs > Zendesk API.
Select the OAuth Clients tab and click "Add OAuth client".
Configure the folllwing OAuth client details: Set Client Name and Description, Set Client Kind to "Confidential", Add appropriate Redirect URLs, Save and securely store the generated Client Secret.
Ensure the OAuth client has the required "read" scope (or "read write" if you need write access).
Generate an Access Token using the implicit grant flow:
In a browser, navigate to:
https://{subdomain}.zendesk.com/oauth/authorizations/new?response_type=token&client_id=<your_client_id>&scope=read
Authenticate and authorize the application when prompted.
After authorization, you'll be redirected to a URL containing the access token in the fragment (after the #). Extract this token.
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Store the generated access token securely. This is the "Implicit grant token" you'll use for Kendra integration.
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Note
We recommend that you regularly refresh or rotate your credentials and secret. Provide only the necessary access level for your own security. We do not recommend that you re-use credentials and secrets across data sources, and connector versions 1.0 and 2.0 (where applicable).
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Optional: Installed an SSL certificate to allow Amazon Kendra to connect.
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Checked each document is unique in Zendesk and across other data sources you plan to use for the same index. Each data source that you want to use for an index must not contain the same document across the data sources. Document IDs are global to an index and must be unique per index.
In your AWS account, make sure you have:
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Created an Amazon Kendra index and, if using the API, noted the index ID.
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Created an IAM role for your data source and, if using the API, noted the ARN of the IAM role.
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If you change your authentication type and credentials, you must update your IAM role to access the correct AWS Secrets Manager secret ID.
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Stored your Zendesk authentication credentials in an AWS Secrets Manager secret and, if using the API, noted the ARN of the secret.
Note
We recommend that you regularly refresh or rotate your credentials and secret. Provide only the necessary access level for your own security. We do not recommend that you re-use credentials and secrets across data sources, and connector versions 1.0 and 2.0 (where applicable).
If you don’t have an existing IAM role or secret, you can use the console to create a new IAM role and Secrets Manager secret when you connect your Zendesk data source to Amazon Kendra. If you are using the API, you must provide the ARN of an existing IAM role and Secrets Manager secret, and an index ID.
Connection instructions
To connect Amazon Kendra to your Zendesk data source, you must provide the necessary details of your Zendesk data source so that Amazon Kendra can access your data. If you have not yet configured Zendesk for Amazon Kendra, see Prerequisites.
To connect Amazon Kendra to Zendesk
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Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon Kendra console
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From the left navigation pane, choose Indexes and then choose the index you want to use from the list of indexes.
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You can choose to configure or edit your User access control settings under Index settings.
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On the Getting started page, choose Add data source.
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On the Add data source page, choose Zendesk connector, and then choose Add connector. If using version 2 (if applicable), choose Zendesk connector with the "V2.0" tag.
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On the Specify data source details page, enter the following information:
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In Name and description, for Data source name—Enter a name for your data source. You can include hyphens but not spaces.
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(Optional) Description—Enter an optional description for your data source.
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In Default language—Choose a language to filter your documents for the index. Unless you specify otherwise, the language defaults to English. Language specified in the document metadata overrides the selected language.
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In Tags, for Add new tag—Include optional tags to search and filter your resources or track your AWS costs.
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Choose Next.
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On the Define access and security page, enter the following information:
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Zendesk URL—Enter your Zendesk URL. For example,
https://{sub-domain}.zendesk.com/
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Authorization—Turn on or off access control list (ACL) information for your documents, if you have an ACL and want to use it for access control. The ACL specifies which documents that users and groups can access. The ACL information is used to filter search results based on the user or their group access to documents. For more information, see User context filtering.
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AWS Secrets Manager secret—Choose an existing secret or create a new Secrets Manager secret to store your Zendesk authentication credentials. If you choose to create a new secret an AWS Secrets Manager secret window opens.
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Create a new secret with the following structure:
{ "hostUrl": "https://yoursubdomain.zendesk.com/", "accessToken": "your_implicit_grant_access_token" }
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Save and add your secret.
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Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)—You can choose to use a VPC. If so, you must add Subnets and VPC security groups.
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Identity crawler—Specify whether to turn on Amazon Kendra’s identity crawler. The identity crawler uses the access control list (ACL) information for your documents to filter search results based on the user or their group access to documents. If you have an ACL for your documents and choose to use your ACL, you can then also choose to turn on Amazon Kendra’s identity crawler to configure user context filtering of search results. Otherwise, if identity crawler is turned off, all documents can be publicly searched. If you want to use access control for your documents and identity crawler is turned off, you can alternatively use the PutPrincipalMapping API to upload user and group access information for user context filtering.
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IAM role—Choose an existing IAM role or create a new IAM role to access your repository credentials and index content.
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IAM roles used for indexes cannot be used for data sources. If you are unsure if an existing role is used for an index or FAQ, choose Create a new role to avoid errors.
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Choose Next.
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On the Configure sync settings page, enter the following information:
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Select contents—Select the types of content you want to crawl from tickets, to help center articles, community topics, and more.
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Organization name—Enter the Zendesk organization names to filter content.
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Sync start date—Enter the date from which you want to start crawling your content.
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Regex patterns—Add regular expression patterns to include or exclude certain files. You can add up to 100 patterns.
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Sync mode—Choose how you want to update your index when your data source content changes. When you sync your data source with Amazon Kendra for the first time, all content is crawled and indexed by default. You must run a full sync of your data if your initial sync failed, even if you don't choose full sync as your sync mode option.
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Full sync: Freshly index all content, replacing existing content each time your data source syncs with your index.
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New, modified sync: Index only new and modified content each time your data source syncs with your index. Amazon Kendra can use your data source's mechanism for tracking content changes and index content that changed since the last sync.
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New, modified, deleted sync: Index only new, modified, and deleted content each time your data source syncs with your index. Amazon Kendra can use your data source's mechanism for tracking content changes and index content that changed since the last sync.
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In Sync run schedule for Frequency—Choose how often to sync your data source content and update your index.
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Choose Next.
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On the Set field mappings page, enter the following information:
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Default data source fields—Select from the Amazon Kendra generated default data source fields you want to map to your index.
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Add field—To add custom data source fields to create an index field name to map to and the field data type.
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Choose Next.
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On the Review and create page, check that the information you have entered is correct and then select Add data source. You can also choose to edit your information from this page. Your data source will appear on the Data sources page after the data source has been added successfully.
Learn more
To learn more about integrating Amazon Kendra with your Zendesk data source, see: