Roles

What are Zendesk roles?

Zendesk uses Roles as a way to maintain permission sets for agents.

Change management

Keep in mind, all change management should be stemming from an issue, first and foremost.

We manage role membership via Zendesk itself (on user profiles), but only with corresponding access request issues.

NOTE Roles are very important to both the use and security of Zendesk. You should be very careful with these at all times. When in doubt, seek assistance from a Fullstack Engineer.

Creating a new role

You will start by creating a placeholder role within Zendesk itself (as you will need the ID for the sync repo). To do this, open up the admin page of your corresponding Zendesk instance (Global or US Government), click People on the left-hand side, and then click Roles. On this page page, you will want to click Create role. This will bring up the new role page.

On this page, you will do the following:

• Set the name to “Placeholder for ISSUE_LINK” (replacing ISSUE_LINK with the link to the issue you are working out of).
• Enter a description of “ISSUE_LINK” (replacing ISSUE_LINK with the link to the issue you are working out of).

After doing so, click the blue Create role button. You will then locate the placeholder ticket field you just created and get the ID value for it

From here, create the merge request in the sync repo project.

Once it is live, access request issues will need to be created to add people to new role.

Updating an existing role

Updating an existing role is considerably easier than creating a new one. Simply change the code in the source project and it will occur via the sync repo.

Deleting a role

NOTE This can be a very dangerous action to perform. Exercise extreme caution in doing do.

To delete a role, you need to purge it from multiple locations:

• Sync repo project
• Zendesk itself

The first can be done via merge requests, but the last one has to be done in the the Zendesk instance itself. Before doing so, 100% of the role’s members should be removed from the role.

After doing so, open up the admin page of your corresponding Zendesk instance (Global or US Government) People on the left-hand side, and then click Roles. On this page page, will locate the role you are aiming to delete and click the three vertical dots on the right-hand side and then click Delete.

This will cause a pop-up modal to appear asking you to confirm the action. Click the red Delete role button to do so.

Troubleshooting

Pipeline error “Blank ID”

This means the script detected a YAML file within data/ that has an id value of blank (or nil). You will need to locate the file mentioned in the error and correct that.

Pipeline error “Blank name”

This means the script detected a YAML file within data/ that has an name value of blank (or nil). You will need to locate the file mentioned in the error and correct that.

Pipeline error “GitLab errors”

This is a generic error message that will detail some error that occurred when trying to either create or update the tag used on the source project. The exact steps to fix this will vary based on the nature of the error itself. You will need to review the error and determine the next steps from there.

If you are unsure how to proceed, it is best to seek assistance from the wider team.

Source Projects

Zendesk Global

• Sync repo project

Zendesk US Government

• Sync repo project