Zendesk Proactive Outage Bulk Notify

Overview

This flow turns a single outage declaration into coordinated Zendesk customer communications. An incident commander declares an outage by posting an /outage <product> command in a designated Microsoft Teams channel. The flow then finds open/active Zendesk tickets that mention the affected product, posts a templated public update and sets status on each, creates one proactive notification ticket to track outbound comms, and posts coordinated summaries to Teams and Outlook.

Why it matters: During incidents, agents cannot update every relevant ticket fast enough. Bulk, consistent updates reduce inbound volume and keep customers informed from one trusted declaration.

Built: CF-722 · Solution FlowLibs - Zendesk Proactive Outage Bulk Notify · Ships Off (demo). Going live requires only connection authorization + environment-variable values.

Use Case

Support and operations want to mass-update relevant tickets and notify customers the moment an outage is declared — without copy-pasting the same update into dozens of tickets by hand. A single Teams command fans out into consistent, auditable customer comms.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Zendesk	shared_zendesk	GetItems
Microsoft Teams	shared_teams	OnNewChannelMessage PostMessageToConversation
Office 365 Outlook	shared_office365	SendEmailV2

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

All-clear sweep

Clone the branch to send a resolution update + reset status to the same matched set when the incident closes.

Product → tag mapping

Replace the subject/description contains filter with a Zendesk tag filter for precise scoping.

Severity templates

Swap varOutageUpdateTemplate by severity, or add a Switch on a severity token parsed from the command.

Declaration source

Replace the Teams trigger with a Microsoft Forms or status-page webhook trigger to declare outages from elsewhere.

Throttling

The loop runs sequentially (concurrency 1); raise concurrency for large ticket volumes once rate limits are confirmed.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@contains(toLower(variables('varMessageText')), toLower(parameters('EnvVar_OutageCommandKeyword')))

@trim(replace(replace(replace(variables('varMessageText'), parameters('EnvVar_OutageCommandKeyword'), ''), '<p>', ''), '</p>', ''))

@concat('https://', parameters('EnvVar_ZendeskSubdomain'), '.zendesk.com/api/v2')

@contains(toLower(concat(coalesce(string(item()?['subject']),''),' ',coalesce(string(item()?['description']),''))), toLower(variables('varAffectedProduct')))

@{concat(variables('varZendeskApiBase'),'/tickets/',item()?['id'],'.json')}

{ "ticket": { "status": "...", "comment": { "body": "...", "public": true } } }

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