Connect Zendesk#

Difficulty: moderate (API token). Sync Zendesk users, organizations, and tickets in both directions.

Auth at a glance#

What you'll need#

• Your Zendesk agent/admin email.
• An API token with token access enabled (Admin Center → Apps and integrations → APIs → Zendesk API → enable Token access → add token).
• Your Zendesk subdomain (yourco → https://yourco.zendesk.com).

Steps#

1. Enable token access and create an API token in Admin Center.
2. In Connections, choose Zendesk → Connect. Enter your plain email + token and the subdomain.
3. Forge stores the token encrypted and verifies the connection.

What you get#

• Source: Zendesk's Incremental Export API is the change feed — Forge polls start_time=<cursor> per object and emits one change per record.
• Destination: upsert Users and Organizations by external_id (server-side create_or_update — no double-create); Tickets via search-then-write.

Gotchas#

• Don't add /token yourself. Zendesk's API-token auth uses username "<email>/token". Forge adds the /token suffix internally — store the bare email. Appending it yourself double-suffixes and fails auth.
• Token access must be enabled in Admin → APIs → Settings, and the token's user needs the right role for writes and deletes. 403 → Forge aborts (permanent auth error).
• Users/Organizations upsert natively; Tickets don't. Tickets are searched by external_id then written, so a fresh ticket can briefly double-create under Zendesk's search-index lag. Users and Organizations are immune.
• Delete is by numeric id. Forge reads the record to resolve its id, then deletes — two calls, but a clean, confirmed removal.
• Incremental export is throttled (~10 requests/minute). Forge paces its polling accordingly.

What Forge provisions for you#

You create the API token (Zendesk requires a human), but Forge handles the API-token auth form, the per-object incremental-export cursors, the search-then-write for Tickets, and the read-then-delete-by-id confirmation.