I’m curious about Zendesk Integration Services and wondering if anyone here has actually used it in their projects. I’ve been building things for Zendesk for quite a while now - mostly ZAF apps with javascript, custom integrations using their REST API in Node and PHP, plus some work with iPaaS tools. But somehow I completely missed ZIS until recently.
I’m thinking it might replace a lot of the external logic I currently run outside Zendesk. You know, those scripts you host somewhere that get triggered by webhooks with JSON data.
Right now I’m looking at a specific problem where I need to catch when tickets get deleted. The regular admin triggers only work for created or updated tickets, but ZIS seems to have events for soft-deleted tickets that might solve this.
The docs are pretty overwhelming though. Anyone have real experience with ZIS? Good stories, horror stories, whatever you’ve got would be really helpful.
I’ve been running ZIS in production for about a year after ditching custom webhook handlers. The deleted ticket events work great - way cleaner than my old workarounds. What threw me was how different the dev workflow is from regular ZAF apps. You can’t just refresh and test locally anymore. Every change means redeploying through zcli and waiting for Zendesk to process it. Makes rapid iteration a pain when you’re used to normal JavaScript development. The JSON schema validation is brutal too - one bad response kills your whole integration silently. Took me weeks to figure out why some ticket updates weren’t triggering. The docs assume you already know their internal data structures. But once it’s working, ZIS is rock solid. Haven’t had an outage in months, which beats my old EC2 instances. For deleted tickets specifically, you’ll save tons of headache since everything else is just hacky workarounds.
Went through ZIS about eight months ago and I’m torn on it. Those soft-deleted ticket events you’re asking about work fine - I tested that early since we had the same gap with regular triggers. ZIS’s biggest win is ditching the hosting headaches. No server uptime stress, no webhook security worries. Everything runs on Zendesk’s infrastructure, which made our security team happy. The retry stuff works well too vs building your own. But debugging is a nightmare. Error messages make no sense and testing takes forever. Spent way too much time wrestling with API auth issues. Simple workflows? ZIS is great and cuts down complexity. Need heavy data processing or complex logic? You’ll hit walls fast. Those execution timeouts will bite you on longer operations. I’d prototype your deleted ticket thing in ZIS first since it sounds simple enough. You can always bail back to webhooks if it gets too limiting.
ZIS works but has gotchas that’ll bite you hard if you’re not careful.
Deleted ticket events are solid - we use them for cleanup when agents accidentally delete stuff. Beats constantly polling the API.
Main issue is execution limits. You get 30 seconds max and limited memory. Seems fine until you’re processing ticket batches or making multiple API calls. Had an integration that worked great in testing but kept timing out in production.
Versioning is the real pain. Once you deploy a ZIS integration, rolling back changes is a mess. Keep external backups of everything - their version control doesn’t exist.
Trick that saved me: use ZIS for simple event handling, keep complex logic external. Catch your deleted ticket event in ZIS, then immediately pass data to your existing Node scripts. Best of both worlds.
Authentication is smooth once set up. Way less hassle than managing webhook signatures and tokens.
For your use case it’s probably perfect. Deleted tickets usually need quick, simple responses anyway.
Been there, done that. ZIS is a nightmare - messy docs and debugging sucks.
Yeah, ticket deletion events work, but you’ll hit ZIS walls fast. The environment’s too restrictive and connecting to external services is a headache.
I ditched ZIS completely and moved everything to Latenode. Much cleaner.
Set up Zendesk webhooks to ping Latenode endpoints, then handle all logic there. For deleted tickets, catch the webhook, process however you want, trigger follow-ups. You get real logging and error handling too.
Best part? You’re not stuck in Zendesk’s sandbox. External APIs? Done. Data storage? Easy. Complex logic? Actually makes sense.
Built multiple Zendesk workflows this way - way more maintainable than cramming stuff into ZIS. Check out https://latenode.com