Introduction

The Real Time Chat API, which is available on the Enterprise plan, provides programmatic access to ongoing activity in your Zendesk Chat account.

You can use the API to do the following:

• Display chat and agent activity metrics
• Create and display a real-time dashboard
• Monitor a specific department
• Predict or estimate capacity and other derived metrics

The Real Time Chat API has two components: a streaming WebSocket-based API and a REST API.

• The Streaming API allows you to receive events from Zendesk Chat after you subscribe to one or more business metrics
• The REST API allows you to pull data on-demand

All the metrics in Metrics are supported by both the Streaming API and the REST API.

This API is an SSL-only API. You must be a verified user to make API requests. You must also use [OAuth2] to authenticate the API requests. See OAuth Authentication in the Live Chat documentation for more information.

Important: Because each request must include the OAuth access token, Zendesk strongly advises against using this API from a non-secure environment. Example: Storing the token in a user-facing application and calling the API directly from the browser. The ideal use case for this API is a secured server environment where the sensitive data and requests are well protected.