Automation rules in Freshdesk continuously monitor new tickets and updates made to tickets. Based on specific events, these rules can automate complex workflows—such as modifying ticket statuses, changing priorities, sending notification alerts, and more.

If you think that your automations are not updating valid tickets or are affecting unrelated ones, use following checklist to troubleshoot the issue.

1. Check the 'Show Activities' section of the affected tickets
2. Verify 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. FAQs

Check the 'Show Activities' section of the affected tickets

1. Navigate to the Tickets tab and select the ticket. 
2. Click Show Activities on the top right corner of the ticket details to view the sequence of events.
   
3. Check for the automation rule name under ticket activities. Clicking the rule will take you to its configuration page for further investigation.
   If the rule wasn’t triggered, look for signs of automation failure, such as:
   1. Rule misfires
   2. Simultaneous updates from multiple rules
   3. Missing events, notifications, or data updates
   4. Sandbox account conditions (e.g., agents acting as requesters)

Verify the order of execution for automation rules.

Automation rules are executed based on their order in the list. Ensure that the rules are organized correctly - rules with more specific conditions should be placed at the top, while generic ones should be lower down.

Avoid conflicts between rules that might override or interfere with each other’s actions.

Check for modifications in automation rules.

Changes to an automation rule can unintentionally affect unrelated tickets. To check for modifications:

1. Navigate to the rule under the Ticket Updates section.
2. Check the Last Modified By section to see:
   • Who made the change
   • When it was made
   • The type of change (update or delete)
   • Specific changes via the View Changes link

Check for invalid ticket properties

Automation rules may refer to custom fields (ticket, contact, or company) that no longer exist. For example, if a deleted property like XYZ is used in a rule, the rule becomes invalid.

• In this case, you can see any missing or empty fields in the automation.
• Remove or replace the invalid property and save the rule to restore proper function.

If you use the Assign to Agent action directly without specifying a group, the ticket may remain unassigned. This is the expected behavior, where the ticket needs to be assigned to the group first, followed by the agent, unless the agent is not part of any group
If you choose Contains, the automation executes when the ticket text matches any words entered in the text. For example, 'Cat' matches 'catapult' and 'cat'.
If you select Has any of these words, the automation rule considers each list entry in the rule (whether a single word or phrase) as separate search term exactly as written. The rule triggers only if the ticket text contains one of the exact terms. Partial matches are not considered. For example, "cat" will match "cat", but not "catapult".
Automations are not triggered when a ticket is created via New Email option as this is used for outbound emails. Use New Ticket option instead.
Automations do not run if the requester is an agent. Ensure test tickets are raised by a non-agent user.

Contact Freshdesk support for further help and clarifications

If the issue persists, contact support@freshdesk.com with the following:

• Screenshot or URL of the affected automation rule
• Screenshot or ID of the related ticket
• Timestamp of the event

Check for webhook drop:

If you received this email,

"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 support@freshdesk.com to request an increase in your API limits. To learn more about how we support webhooks and why we drop them, click here."

FAQs

1. My automation is not updating the contact as expected
   The Set Contact As automation field works only for 'Field Service Agents' and not for regular tickets.
   
   
2. Why did an email get assigned to me even though the trigger words were missing?
   The automation could have been triggered if "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 trigger when the ticket subject or description contains the word "important." To avoid this issue, it's recommended to use the "Has any of the words" condition instead of "Contains" in the rule.
   
   
3. How to create an automation rule to trigger where the subject is not empty?
   It is not possible to set up an automation to check for empty subject lines or ticket fields.
   
   
4. 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?
   The ticket description will be added to the email. However, when placeholders like {{ticket.description}} are used in the description field, they are treated 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, leading to issues with automation and causing the HTML content to break.
   
   
5. We have an automation to send and email to the requesters, but the email requesters receive is blank. Can you help?
   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.

Note: 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.