Why connect ZenDesk to Lavawall®?
If you’re an MSP using ZenDesk for tickets and Lavawall® for managed device monitoring, security posture, and remote support, the two systems shouldn’t live in separate worlds. The ZenDesk connector pulls your tickets, organizations, contacts, knowledge base articles, macros, and dynamic content variables into Lavawall® on a recurring basis — so you can:
- See ZenDesk tickets alongside device health, patch status, and security alerts in a single console.
- Import your team’s ZenDesk macros as canned responses and keep using the same shortcuts your technicians already know.
- Run remote-support sessions from a Lavawall® managed device and have the time, notes, and chat transcript filed against the right ticket automatically.
- Keep ZenDesk as your customer-facing helpdesk while gradually unifying internal workflows.
What gets synced
The connector runs every few minutes and is fully incremental — only changed records cross the wire after the initial backfill.
| Object | What we import | Two-way? |
|---|---|---|
| Organizations | Maps to Lavawall® client orgs by name. Keeps domain lists, notes, and tags in sync. | Read |
| Users / contacts | End-users and agents come in with email, phone, role, and organization. Agents are flagged so they appear correctly in assignment dropdowns. | Read |
| Tickets | Subject, description, status, priority, requester, assignee, created/updated timestamps, all comments, and CC’d users. Backfills full history then switches to incremental cursor sync. | Read |
| Knowledge base articles | Titles, bodies (with embedded images), categories, and section structure for in-app KB search and the ticket-side knowledge panel. | Read |
| Agent groups | Groups and their memberships, used to restrict canned-response visibility to the right team. | Read |
| Dynamic content | ZenDesk dynamic-content placeholders (e.g. {{dc.greeting}}) are imported as Lavawall® canned-response variables, scoped MSP-wide and overridable per child company. |
Read |
| Macros | Shared, group-restricted, and personal macros — with images, formatting, and Liquid placeholders translated to Lavawall® equivalents. See macros section. | Read |
Note: at present the connector is read-only from ZenDesk → Lavawall®. Two-way sync (creating ZenDesk tickets from Lavawall®-originated work) is on the roadmap.
Setup
You’ll need:
- A ZenDesk admin user. Personal macros for technicians other than the API token user can only be pulled by an admin token.
- An API token from your ZenDesk account (Admin Center → Apps and integrations → APIs → ZenDesk API).
- Your ZenDesk subdomain (the part before
.zendesk.com).
- In Lavawall®, expand Helpdesk on the left navigation and click Sources & Setup.
- Click Add ZenDesk.
- Enter your subdomain, the email of the admin user the token belongs to, and the API token. Click Test connection.
- Once the test succeeds, click Save. The first sync starts immediately and runs the initial backfill in the background — expect a few minutes for a small account, longer for accounts with thousands of tickets and end-users.
- Toggle PSA daemon on under your account settings to keep the connector running automatically every few minutes.
Tips:
- The setup page shows live counts as objects come in, plus a per-step success/failure indicator.
- If the sync hits an authentication error, the indicator turns red with the exact API response so you don’t have to dig through logs.
- The Re-sync button on the setup page kicks off an immediate run without waiting for the next scheduled tick.
Macros & canned responses
This is the part most teams care about most. ZenDesk macros land in Lavawall® as canned responses with everything that makes them useful preserved:
Embedded images
Images attached to ZenDesk macros are downloaded once during sync and stored as inline base64 data URIs. Recipients see them rendered directly in your reply — no auth-protected URLs that break for end users.
Shortcuts preserved
Each canned response gets a slash shortcut. Type / in any ticket reply to filter and pick the right one without leaving the keyboard. We preserve your team’s muscle memory across re-syncs — existing shortcuts don’t change.
Owner attribution
Personal macros are imported owned by the technician who created them in ZenDesk — so each agent only sees their own private templates, not everyone else’s.
Group restrictions
Macros restricted to a specific ZenDesk group are imported with the same restriction. Only members of that agent group will see them in their canned-response picker.
Categories
If your macros use the Category::Subcategory title convention, the prefix is parsed and used to populate Lavawall®’s category filter. Filter the canned-response list by Billing, Onboarding, etc.
Liquid → placeholders
ZenDesk Liquid markup is automatically translated. {{ticket.requester.first_name}} becomes {{first_name}}, {{current_user.name}} becomes {{agent_full_name}}, and so on. Filters and unsupported control tags are stripped cleanly.
Inactive macros
Inactive macros in ZenDesk are imported as inactive in Lavawall® — they’re still in your database for reference but won’t appear in the agent’s canned-response picker. A simple toggle in the editor lets you re-enable any of them, and the list view has a Show inactive switch so administrators can find and clean up old templates.
Data & privacy
- Where it’s stored: all data syncs into your Lavawall® tenant database, hosted in the same region as the rest of your console data.
- Credentials: API tokens are encrypted at rest and never displayed back in the UI after entry. Only Super Admins on your account can edit the source configuration.
- Reads only: the connector requests
tickets:read,users:read,organizations:read,articles:read, andmacros:readpermissions. It does not write to ZenDesk. - Audit: every sync run is logged with start time, duration, per-object counts, and any error messages. Available under Helpdesk → Sources & Setup → Sync history.
- Removal: deleting a ZenDesk source from the setup page removes the credentials and stops further syncs. Imported records remain (so historical tickets stay accessible) and can be deleted in bulk if needed.
Pricing
The ZenDesk connector is included with all Lavawall® MSP plans at no extra cost. The only thing that affects throughput is your ZenDesk account’s API rate limit — we respect those automatically and back off when needed.
Ready to connect?
Sign in to your Lavawall® console and head to Helpdesk → Sources & Setup. Or, if you don’t have an account yet, start a free trial and the connector will be waiting in the menu.