Automation rules in Freshdesk are constantly on the lookout for new tickets and updates made to your tickets in your helpdesk. Based on the specified events that occur, you can use them to automate complex workflows, modify statuses, change priorities, send out notification alerts, and so on. 

If you believe that your automations are not updating valid tickets or affecting unrelated tickets, here are a series of checks to help you troubleshoot the issue at hand.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• 1. Check the 'Show Activities' section of the affected tickets.
• 2. Check the order of execution for automation rules.
• 3. Check for modifications in automation rules.
• 4. Check for invalid ticket properties.
• 5. Contact Freshdesk support for further help and clarifications.
• 6. Check for webhook drop
• 7. Common scenarios

1. Check the 'Show Activities' section of the affected tickets.

Navigate to the Tickets tab and select the ticket. Click Show Activities on the top right corner of the ticket details to display the sequence of events on the tickets.

Check if the system has executed the desired automation rule with the rule's name displayed under ticket activities. Clicking the rule will take you to the automation configuration page, where you can check what went wrong.



If not, check for any anomalies that potentially indicate the automation failure like,

1. automation rule misfires, 

2. simultaneous updates by different rules, 

3. missing events or notifications or data updates, 

4. or sandbox account settings where agents assume the role of requestors for testing automations.

2. Check the order of execution for automation rules.

The order of the rule in your list of automations determines when your rules will trigger. Make sure you organize your rules properly - automations with specific conditions are higher on the list, and those with more generic rules are towards the bottom. 

It is also essential to avoid conflicts between automation rules that modify the action performed by another rule. 

3. Check for modifications in automation rules.

A recent modification to the automation rule may also be the cause for impacting unintended tickets. 

1. To check for modifications, please navigate to the automation rule under the Ticket Updates section and refer to the Last Modified and By sections.

2. Click on the name under the By section, which will display details of the changes.

   • Who made the changes, 

   • When was the change performed, 

   • What was the nature of the change - delete or update?

   • What exactly was changed?

   • Click the view changes link to look at the exact condition or event modified.

4. Check for invalid ticket properties.

Your automation rule may refer to a custom ticket/contact/company property that is no longer valid/exists. For example, deleting a custom ticket property, 'XYZ,' referred to in one of your automation rule conditions makes the rule invalid. To identify this, you would see the particular field empty within automation.

Rewrite and save the rule by removing the invalid property condition and monitor the automation behavior for further issues.

Note: 1) When the 'Assign to agent' action is directly utilized in automation and the automation is executed, the ticket will not have an agent assigned to it. This behavior is expected in Freshdesk, where tickets are initially assigned to the group and then to agents within that group. Therefore, in automation, it's necessary to specify the group where the agent is present, followed by the agent. This is an exception for the agent who is not a part of any groups in your helpdesk.
2) If you are using 'Contains', the automation will look only for the exact match specified in the phrase. However, 'Has any of these words' will search for any of the words used in the specified phrase that matches with the ticket and execute the automation.
3) The ticket creation automation will not be executed when the 'New email' option is used, as this option is primarily intended for sending outbound emails from Freshdesk. Instead, please consider using the 'New Ticket' option for the automation to be executed.
4) No automation will execute if the requester is an agent. When testing automation, ensure that the requester is not an agent.

5. Contact Freshdesk support for further help and clarifications.

If the issue persists, please reach out to [email protected], along with the details mentioned below to troubleshoot further

• Screenshot of the automation rule that did not execute, from the rule name to the action configured (or) the URL of the automation rule
• Screenshot of the ticket that the automation is supposed to run (or) the ticket ID
• Matching timestamp

6. Check for webhook drop:

If you have received an email stating,

"A webhook that was scheduled 24 hours ago for execution has now been dropped since you consistently exceeded your API rate limits.

If you wish to prevent this from happening again, email us at [email protected] to request an increase in your API limits. To learn more about how we support webhooks and why we drop them, click here."

7. Common scenarios

• Q: My automation is not changing the contact to the contact I set
  A: The 'Set Contact As' automation field works only for 'Field Service Agents' and not on normal/regular tickets. Hence any that uses this action would not take effect.

• Q: I created an automation, and I don't understand why this email is assigned to me when the indicated words are absent. Can you help me understand what I did wrong?

  A: The automation was triggered as "your_text" was embedded in a hyperlink within the ticket. The automation system detected "your_text" based on the "contains" condition in the ticket setup, leading to its execution. This occurred because the system recognized the abbreviated form of "your_text" in the backend XML content. To resolve this, use "Has any of these words" instead of "contains" in the condition settings.
  For example, If an automation is set to trigger based on the word "import," and the trigger conditions are configured as follows: In Tickets > If Subject or Description > Contains "import," it may inadvertently trigger when the ticket subject or description contains the word "important." This occurs because "import" is a part of the word "important," thus fulfilling the condition. To avoid this issue, it's recommended to use the "Has any of the words" condition instead of "Contains" in the rule.
  
  

• Q: I would like an automation to trigger if the subject is not empty. What should I fill in as the condition?

  A: It is not possible to set up an automation to check for empty subject lines or ticket fields.
  
  

• Q: The automation's subject line includes placeholders for Ticket Subject, Ticket Description, and the Ticket Company name. However, when the email is sent, it only includes the ticket subject. Why is this happening?

  A: The ticket description will be added to the email. However, in Freshdesk, the ticket description is interpreted as HTML when the placeholder is used. When you use the placeholder {{ticket.description}} in the description field, it is passed as HTML and automatically converted into text. Conversely, if you use the ticket description placeholder in the Ticket Subject, it is sent as HTML and not converted into text. As a result, it is displayed as HTML content itself, which is why you see those DIV tags. This may lead to issues with automation and cause the HTML content to break.
  
  

• Q: We have an automation to send and email to the requesters, but the email requesters receive is blank. Can you help?
  A: The issue of emails being received with blank content is often due to formatting problems. To resolve this, follow these steps: Remove the entire content of the email in the automation rule. Copy the content and paste it into a plain text editor like Notepad. Copy the content from Notepad and paste it back into the automation. This process helps to eliminate any unsupported formatting issues that might be causing the problem. After making these changes, the email should be sent with the correct content. If you had hyperlinks in the email, they might have contributed to the problem as well. Regarding the concern of line length limits, it's important to note that there is an RFC email standard set globally, and if the line length exceeds this standard, an error message can be retrieved. You can refer to this external article. Additionally, if the email contains a lot of HTML content that could exceed line length limits, it's possible that the email might be sent as blank. This often happens when email content is copy-pasted from another source. In such cases, copying over backend code from the source can increase the size of the email and lead to formatting issues.

Regarding the concern of line length limits on composing the email content in automation, it's important to note that there is an RFC email standard set globally, and if the line length exceeds this standard, an error message can be retrieved.