## Introduction
In startup operations, maintaining a clear understanding of support engineers’ capacity is crucial to ensuring optimal workload distribution, timely issue resolution, and overall team productivity. Manual reporting often leads to delays, inaccuracies, and lack of real-time insights, hindering effective decision-making.
This article provides a detailed, technical guide to automating daily capacity reports for support engineers using n8n, an open-source workflow automation tool. The workflow integrates data from ticketing and time-tracking systems like Zendesk and Harvest, processes the information, and sends comprehensive daily reports to the Operations team via Slack or email.
The primary beneficiaries of this automation are Operations Managers, Support Team Leads, and Support Engineers themselves, enabling proactive workload management and capacity planning.
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## Tools and Services Integrated
– **n8n**: The core workflow automation platform.
– **Zendesk**: To extract ticket data such as open tickets, ticket status, and assigned engineers.
– **Harvest**: For time tracking data, showing hours logged by each support engineer.
– **Google Sheets**: (Optional) For recording historical capacity reports.
– **Slack or Email**: For sending the daily capacity reports.
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## High-Level Workflow Overview
1. **Trigger:** The workflow will be triggered once daily at a scheduled time using n8n’s Cron node.
2. **Data Extraction:** Fetch assigned and open tickets from Zendesk; retrieve hours logged from Harvest for the support engineers.
3. **Data Aggregation and Processing:** Calculate each engineer’s capacity based on ticket counts, hours worked, and predefined limits.
4. **Report Generation:** Format the aggregated data into a clear, structured daily report.
5. **Notification:** Send the report via Slack message or email to the Operations team.
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## Step-By-Step Technical Tutorial
### 1. Setting Up n8n
If you haven’t already, set up n8n by:
– Hosting it locally, on a server, or via n8n cloud.
– Setting up credentials for Zendesk, Harvest, Slack, and Google Sheets, which will be used in various nodes.
### 2. Creating the Cron Trigger
– Add a **Cron node** and set it to execute daily at a desired time (e.g., every day at 7:00 AM UTC).
### 3. Fetch Support Tickets from Zendesk
– Add a **Zendesk node** configured to:
– Use the **Search Tickets** or **List Tickets** operation.
– Filter tickets assigned to support engineers and with status ‘open’ or ‘pending’.
– Ensure fields include ticket ID, assigned engineer, status, and priority.
**Tip:** Use Zendesk API pagination if there are many tickets.
### 4. Fetch Time Tracking Data from Harvest
– Add a **Harvest node**.
– Use the **Get Time Entries** operation filtered to the same timeframe (previous day) and to support engineers.
– Extract total hours logged per engineer.
### 5. Data Aggregation
– Use a **Function node** or **Code node** to:
– Group tickets by assigned engineers.
– Count the number of open tickets.
– Match time logged hours per engineer.
– Calculate capacity as (e.g., max capacity hours – hours worked).
Example Function Node pseudocode:
“`javascript
const tickets = items[0].json.tickets;
const timeEntries = items[1].json.timeEntries;
const engineers = {};
// Initialize engineers object
// Example: { engineerId: { ticketsCount: 0, hoursWorked: 0 } }
for (const ticket of tickets) {
const engineer = ticket.assignee_id;
engineers[engineer] = engineers[engineer] || { ticketsCount: 0, hoursWorked: 0 };
engineers[engineer].ticketsCount += 1;
}
for (const entry of timeEntries) {
const engineer = entry.user_id;
engineers[engineer] = engineers[engineer] || { ticketsCount: 0, hoursWorked: 0 };
engineers[engineer].hoursWorked += entry.hours;
}
// Calculate capacity assuming 8 hours per day
for (const engineerId in engineers) {
engineers[engineerId].capacity = 8 – engineers[engineerId].hoursWorked;
}
return [{ json: { engineers } }];
“`
### 6. Generate Report Text
– Use another **Function node** to format the aggregated capacity data into a readable report string.
Example output:
“`
Daily Support Engineer Capacity Report – {{date}}
Engineer | Open Tickets | Hours Worked | Remaining Capacity
——– | ———— | ———— | ——————
Alice | 5 | 6.5 | 1.5
Bob | 3 | 7.0 | 1.0
…
“`
### 7. Send Report
– Depending on preference, use either:
– **Slack node** to send the report to a specific channel or user.
– **Email node** to send a formatted email summary.
Configure the node with the message content from the previous step.
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## Common Errors and Robustness Tips
– **API Rate Limits:** Both Zendesk and Harvest APIs may have rate limits. Implement pagination and error retries with the **HTTP Request node** or within native nodes.
– **Missing Data:** Some engineers might not have tickets or time entries for the day. Handle nulls gracefully in the aggregation step.
– **Time Zone Considerations:** Coordinate all data times to UTC or your team’s timezone to avoid inconsistencies.
– **Credential Expiry:** Monitor and refresh API tokens to maintain uninterrupted access.
– **Error Notifications:** Add error handling nodes to capture and notify in Slack/email if the workflow fails.
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## Scaling and Adaptations
– **Add More Data Sources:** Integrate additional tools like Jira, Freshdesk, or internal databases.
– **Historical Data Tracking:** Log daily reports into Google Sheets or a database to analyze trends over time.
– **Dynamic Capacity:** Adjust maximum working hours based on shifts, days, or engineer availability.
– **Dashboard Integration:** Instead of static messages, send data to BI tools like Google Data Studio via BigQuery or database connectors.
– **Real-Time Alerts:** Configure triggers for thresholds (e.g., when any engineer has >10 open tickets) for proactive management.
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## Summary
Automating daily capacity reports with n8n streamlines support operations by providing timely, accurate insights on engineer workloads. This solution saves manual effort, improves response times, and helps management optimize resources effectively.
Following the steps outlined above, Operations teams can build a robust and extensible workflow, tailored to their specific tools and reporting needs.
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## Bonus Tip
To enhance readability in Slack, format reports using Slack’s Block Kit JSON formatting, enabling interactive and visually clear messages. n8n’s Slack node supports sending messages with blocks, providing richer, user-friendly reports.