Freshdesk

The Freshdesk connector integrates Freshdesk—a cloud-based customer support platform—with Glean. This integration allows support, IT, and operations teams to search tickets, solution articles, contacts, and companies alongside their other enterprise knowledge. The connector mirrors Freshdesk’s role‑based permissions and ticket visibility so users only see content they are allowed to access in Freshdesk.

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Overview

Freshdesk is a multi-channel support platform used to manage tickets, workflows, self-service knowledge bases, and analytics. Connecting Freshdesk to Glean enables teams to:

• Search tickets, solution articles, contacts, and companies from one place instead of pivoting between tools.
• Use Glean Assistant to summarize tickets, propose fixes, and synthesize context across Freshdesk and other connected systems.
• Use Glean Agents to automate common support, operations, and reporting workflows using Freshdesk data.
• Build reports and operational views (such as tickets by customer, group, or agent) using natural-language queries.

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Freshdesk data retrieval

Freshdesk supports both native indexing and real-time data fetching to ensure high performance and data freshness. Data fetching retrieves real-time, permission‑aware Freshdesk data at query time for eligible experiences in Glean Search and Glean Assistant.

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Usage in Glean

This section describes how Freshdesk content is used across Glean Search, Glean Assistant, and Glean Agents.

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Glean Search

Users can run keyword or natural‑language queries in Glean Search that return Freshdesk items alongside content from other tools (for example, Drive, Confluence, Slack):

• Find tickets by subject, status, priority, tags, group, or escalation.
  Examples:
  • “network timeout tickets from the last 7 days with High priority.”
  • “Tickets escalated to Tier‑1 Support for Customer X.”
• Look up solution articles to resolve a ticket.
  Examples:
  • “Solution articles about SAML SSO failures.”
  • “Articles in the ‘Billing’ category updated this month.”
• Retrieve contact and company context linked to tickets.
  Examples:
  • “Tickets opened by jane.doe@example.com in the last 90 days.”
  • “Tickets for companies in the ‘Enterprise’ segment with open high‑priority issues.”

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Glean Assistant

Glean Assistant uses Freshdesk as a retrieval source to ground answers in real ticket and knowledge‑base data:

• Resolve tickets faster
  • “Summarize this Freshdesk ticket and propose the next steps.”
  • “Show similar resolved tickets for this issue and summarize how they were fixed.”
• Draft and refine replies
  • “Draft a response to this ticket using the top related solution article.”
  • “Rewrite this reply in a more empathetic tone while keeping the technical content.”
• Self‑productivity for frontline agents
  • “Which tickets are open, assigned to me, and marked as High priority?”
  • “Summarize high‑priority tickets raised by Customer X in the last 3 months.”

Assistant experiences remain permission‑aware. Assistant can only use Freshdesk items that the signed‑in user is allowed to see in Freshdesk.

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Glean Agents

Glean Agents let users define reusable, multi‑step workflows and “mini‑apps” that operate on Freshdesk data plus other systems (for example, CRM, HR, project tools):

• Ops and leadership reporting
  • “Create a weekly report of all tickets created or updated in the last day, grouped by customer and priority, including assignee and SLA status.”
  • “Generate a table of open escalations in top customer accounts with owner, severity, and days open.”
• Playbooks and health monitoring
  • “For each top‑tier account, pull all open Freshdesk tickets, group them by product area, and highlight customers at risk.”
  • “Summarize failure patterns across tickets that mention ‘checkout error’ and propose themes for an incident review.”
• Agent productivity automations
  • “For my queue, summarize all tickets updated in the last 24 hours and draft a short update for each one.”
  • “Categorize my open tickets by product, priority, and company tier.”

When designing Agents, treat Freshdesk like any other connector: use Freshdesk results as context, optionally combine with other connectors, and, where available, pair with Freshdesk‑specific actions (for example, ticket update actions) in your Agent definitions.

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Supported features

• Mirror Freshdesk permissions: Glean mirrors Freshdesk roles, groups, and ticket‑scope so users only see tickets, solution articles, contacts, and companies they can access in Freshdesk.
• Provide deep links: Each result links back to the corresponding Freshdesk item (ticket, solution article, contact, or company) in the Freshdesk UI.
• Sync data via crawls: The connector uses initial full crawls to populate the index and incremental crawls to keep tickets, solution articles, contacts, and companies up to date.
• Secure user access: The connector prevents anonymous or link-based access. All content visibility is strictly tied to an authenticated Freshdesk user identity.

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Supported objects

The following table summarizes the main objects and representative fields (non‑exhaustive). For each object:

• Glean indexes full text (where applicable) plus key metadata for search ranking and filters.
• Metadata is used to power filters and result displays (for example, status, priority, group, company, last updated time).

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Permissions and visibility

Freshdesk determines content access through roles, groups, and ticket scopes. The Glean connector mirrors these rules to ensure data security.

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Roles and RBAC

• Users (typically agents) are assigned roles such as Agent, Supervisor, or Administrator.
• Roles control permissions for viewing, creating, editing, and deleting objects such as tickets and solution articles.
• Roles control permissions for viewing solutions, contacts, and companies data; the connector strictly enforces this permissions model.

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Groups and ticket scope

The connector uses an agent’s group membership and assigned scope to filter ticket results:

• Group membership: Agents can belong to one or more groups (e.g., “Tier-1 Support,” “Billing,” or “Enterprise Support”).
• Ticket scope: Each agent has a ticket_scope value that defines their visibility level:
  • Global (1): Can view all tickets.
  • Group (2): Can view tickets assigned to their specific group(s).
  • Restricted (3): Can view only tickets assigned directly to them.

The connector evaluates both the agent’s scope for tickets and their role-based tab permissions for solution articles, contacts, and companies.

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Identity and access requirements

Access is restricted to registered Freshdesk users. When a user searches in Glean:

• Glean resolves their Freshdesk identity and associated metadata.
• Results are filtered so that the user only sees tickets, articles, contacts, and companies they can access in Freshdesk.
• Glean never grants elevated permissions. If an administrator cannot access an object in Freshdesk, that object will not appear in their Glean search results.

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Prerequisites

Before you start, ensure you have:

• A Freshdesk cloud instance.
• A Freshdesk user with Gglobal ticket scope (ticket_scope: 1) so Glean can crawl all tickets.
• Access to the Glean Admin console with permission to add and configure data sources.

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Required permissions

Glean requires an API key from a Freshdesk agent with specific permissions to crawl your data. There are two configuration options:

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Option 1: Use a default admin role (recommended)

Assign the agent one of these built-in roles, which include all necessary permissions:

• Account Administrator
• Administrator

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Option 2: Create a custom role with specific permissions

If you prefer a least-privilege custom role, ensure it includes the following permissions:

• View solutions tab: Required for crawling solution articles.
• View customers tab: Required for crawling contacts and companies.
• Admin (Play God with Super Admin controls): Required to crawl Freshdesk agents for permission mapping.

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Setup instructions

This section describes the setup path for the Freshdesk connector.

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Step 1: Determine your Freshdesk domain

1. Open your Freshdesk instance in a web browser.
2. Locate the URL in the address bar, which follows this format: https://<instance-domain>.freshdesk.com. For example, if you access Freshdesk at https://glean.freshdesk.com, the domain is glean.

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Step 2: Generate a Freshdesk API key

1. Log in to Freshdesk as the admin user you will use for Glean.
2. Click your profile picture in the top‑right corner.
3. Select Profile Settings.
4. Click View API Key on the right side of the page.
5. Copy the displayed API key. Treat this key as a secret.

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Step 3: Configure credentials in Glean

1. In the Glean Admin Console, go to Data sources and select Add data source.
2. Choose Freshdesk from the list of native connectors.
3. Enter a Name and icon for your data source.
4. Select data retrieval methods. Enable both methods for optimal results (recommended):
   • Data crawling and indexing: Uses scheduled full and incremental crawls to sync content and permissions into the Glean index.
   • Data fetching: Retrieves live data at query time via the Freshdesk Search API.
5. In the Freshdesk connector setup screen:
   • Enter the Freshdesk domain (for example, glean).
   • Paste the API key you generated in Freshdesk.
6. Click Save to complete the configuration.

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Crawling strategy and update behavior

The Freshdesk connector uses a combination of full and incremental crawls to index and update data. It performs frequent incremental updates for active tickets and periodic full crawls to capture long-tail changes and ensure data consistency.

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Crawl types

Full crawls: Enumerate all in-scope objects for a specific type, such as all solution articles, contacts, companies, and tickets within the configured lookback window. Glean uses full crawls during initial setup and periodically thereafter to reconcile the index. Incremental crawls: Fetch records modified since the previous crawl based on Freshdesk timestamps or pagination cursors. These crawls ensure that frequently updated objects remain current between full crawls. Identity and permission crawls: Retrieve agents, roles, groups, and associated metadata. Glean uses this data to compute and enforce Access Control Lists (ACLs).

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Crawling strategy table

This table summarizes how the connector treats different categories of data. Exact intervals are tuned per deployment and may change over time; treat these as behavioral patterns rather than precise SLAs. Freshdesk does not currently use webhooks. All freshness is driven by scheduled API calls and the configuration managed by Glean. For large or API‑sensitive deployments, work with your Glean representative to tune crawl frequencies and API usage.

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API usage

The connector uses the Freshdesk REST API to ingest content and permissions. Representative endpoints include (non‑exhaustive):

• Tickets
  • GET /api/v2/tickets – list tickets (paged, filtered by updated time / lookback).
  • GET /api/v2/tickets/{id} – fetch ticket details.
  • GET /api/v2/tickets/{id}/conversations – fetch conversation threads and replies.
• Solutions (knowledge base)
  • GET /api/v2/solutions/categories – list solution categories.
  • GET /api/v2/solutions/folders – list folders within categories.
  • GET /api/v2/solutions/folders/{folder_id}/articles – list articles.
• Contacts and companies
  • GET /api/v2/contacts – list contacts.
  • GET /api/v2/companies – list companies.
• Identity and validation
  • GET /api/v2/agents/me – validate global ticket scope for the integration user.
  • GET /api/v2/groups – validate group access and admin permissions.
  • GET /api/v2/contacts and GET /api/v2/solutions/categories – validate access to Customers and Solutions tabs.

Glean uses paginated requests (with per_page limits) and standard backoff on errors to respect Freshdesk rate limits. The connector is read‑only: it does not modify Freshdesk data.