Use federal-sync mechanism for main ZD instance

Problem Statement

  • What is the problem?

The current Zendesk Organization sync is utilizing the Salesforce app for new Zendesk Support. We have seen numerous issues of this integration not correctly syncing organizations. We have found many organizations that will not sync. Despite numerous hours of support-ops investigating this, no clear issue has been determined. We have spoken with Zendesk support, however, that is not providing much guidance to resolving this problem.

  • Why is this a problem?

Support depends on Salesforces as the SSOT. In that vein, we depend on the information that appears in Zendesk for organizations and contacts to be accurate. Perhaps the biggest dependency of this information is that it helps to determine SLA. Beyond that, the quality of support we provide diminishes when we are not able to correct associate a user with an organization or when we have to ask the user for license/subscriber information to correctly work their ticket.

Proposal

To fix the problem statement, I propose we use the same mechanism that the US Federal Zendesk instance is using (see related issues). As the first iteration, I propose we just have this doing the Organization syncing. This is because the current sync does not sync contacts. I also propose we keep the integrations ticket syncing, as that is one part of it that is working without known issue. The steps for the change would be:

  • Test in Sandbox
  • Verify it works in sandbox without issue
  • Add sync to the main instance
  • Disable Organization syncing in the current syncing integration.

A future iteration would be to include the contact syncing, much in the same way the federal instance is doing.

As this is a major change, I would like to do this during off business hours (a Saturday perhaps?) and have others present to aid in testing.

DRI

@jcolyer will act as the DRI for this issue.

Required Resources

  • This will require ample testing in the Zendesk sandbox.
  • This will require a new ops.gitlab.org project (I have access to create this).
  • This will require a massive change to our documentation.

Potential Roadblocks/Things to consider

  • This is a massive change. Even following MVC, the change of the sync mechanism is no small task. I would like to
  • We would want to comb the current handbook for any areas where we would need to fully document the change we would be undertaking here.

Desired Outcome

  • What does success look like?

    • We would see a dramatic decrease in the organizations with information that is not an EXACT match in Salesforce.
    • We would be able to depend on the information we see in Zendesk as accurate.

  • How do we measure success?

    • We should be able to pull metrics on the number of tickets being created without an org associated to them.
    • The number of orgs with incorrect information should decrease. I am not fully sure how this would be measured though?

  • Where would future feedback go?

    • Future feedback would go to issues created in the support-ops issue tracker.

Related Issues/MRs/Epics/Tickets