Zendesk is an online customer service and support ticketing (help desk) system.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides cloud-based object storage through a web service interface. You can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. S3 objects, which may be structured in any way, are stored in resources called buckets.

You can extract data from Zendesk's servers using the Zendesk REST API, which exposes data about tickets, agents, clients, groups, and more. To get data on a ticket, for example, you could call GET /api/v2/tickets.json.

The Zendesk API returns JSON-formatted data. Here's an example of the kind of response you might see when querying for the details of a ticket.

{
  "id":               35436,
  "url":              "https://company.zendesk.com/api/v2/tickets/35436.json",
  "external_id":      "ahg35h3jh",
  "created_at":       "2017-07-20T22:55:29Z",
  "updated_at":       "2017-08-05T10:38:52Z",
  "type":             "incident",
  "subject":          "Help, my printer is on fire!",
  "raw_subject":      "{{dc.printer_on_fire}}",
  "description":      "The fire is very colorful.",
  "priority":         "high",
  "status":           "open",
  "recipient":        "support@company.com",
  "requester_id":     20978392,
  "submitter_id":     76872,
  "assignee_id":      235323,
  "organization_id":  509974,
  "group_id":         98738,
  "collaborator_ids": [35334, 234],
  "forum_topic_id":   72648221,
  "problem_id":       9873764,
  "has_incidents":    false,
  "due_at":           null,
  "tags":             ["enterprise", "other_tag"],
  "via": {
    "channel": "web"
  },
  "custom_fields": [
    {
      "id":    27642,
      "value": "745"
    },
    {
      "id":    27648,
      "value": "yes"
    }
  ],
  "satisfaction_rating": {
    "id": 1234,
    "score": "good",
    "comment": "Great support!"
  },
  "sharing_agreement_ids": [84432]
}

To upload files you must first create an S3 bucket. Once you have a bucket you can add an object to it. An object can be any kind of file: a text file, data file, photo, or anything else. You can optionally compress or encrypt the files before you load them.

You've built a script that pulls data from Zendesk and loads it into your destination database, but what happens tomorrow when you have dozens of new tickets and related data?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, Zendesk's API returns updated_at fields that allow you to identify new records. Once you've taken new data into account, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

S3 is great, but sometimes you want a more structured repository that can serve as a basis for BI reports and data analytics — in short, a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, or Panoply, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Azure Synapse Analytics, and To Panoply.