The Support Enterprise plan provides two help desk instances: a customer-facing production instance and a development instance known as the sandbox. Use the sandbox to test, learn, and make mistakes before making your changes public. For example, you can use the sandbox to test and fine-tune new templates and branding without affecting your customers. You can create a new sandbox anytime you want, but you can only have one at a time.
After you're done testing and deploying your changes, you can reset the sandbox for a fresh round of development.
This article contains the following topics:
How the sandbox works
The sandbox takes the following settings from your production instance of Zendesk Support. This matching ensures your starting point is as close to the current production instance as possible.
- Templates (standard emails, welcome emails, etc.)
- Branding (colors, account names, etc.)
- Settings (channels, agent permissions, etc.)
- Customer lists
- Add-ons
Any changes you make in the sandbox are not copied to your production instance. Once you're satisfied with the changes, you must reproduce them manually in the production instance. If you need to configure additional syncing from production to your sandbox, you can do so using our REST API.
The production instance owner is listed as the sandbox owner by default. This is true even if another admin resets the sandbox.
The sandbox does not replicate the following items:
- Help Center content and customizations
- Zendesk Talk data
- Zendesk Chat data
- Security settings (including SSO)
- API tokens
- Apps and integrations
- Conditional fields
- Roles and groups
- Business Rules: Triggers and Automations
- Views
- Macros
- Custom Fields: ticket, org, user
- Tickets, end-users, orgs, data
For more information about the Premium Sandbox, see Testing changes with the Premium Sandbox.
If you want to buy the Premium Sandbox, contact your Zendesk sales representative, or email support@zendesk.com.
Creating a sandbox
Before using your sandbox you must initialize it. The sandbox is created with settings from your current production instance of Zendesk Support.
To create a sandbox
- Click the Admin icon (
) in the sidebar, then select Manage > Sandbox. - Click the Create my Sandbox button.
When your sandbox is successfully created, a message appears at the top of the page, and new sandbox information appears at the bottom. The sandbox has a unique URL with a ten-digit number after your domain name.
Working in your sandbox
Make sure you initialize the sandbox before using it for the first time. See Create your first sandbox above.
To switch to the sandbox from the production instance of Zendesk Support
- Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Manage > Sandbox.
- Click the Copy button to save the new URL to your clipboard, or click Open in new tab. You can also bookmark the sandbox and access it from your browser.
- Log in to the sandbox with your normal administrator credentials.
- Make changes, test, and fine tune.
Sandbox changes are not copied to the production instance. Once you're satisfied with the changes, you must reproduce them manually in the production instance.
Resetting your sandbox
After you're done with a round of testing and updates, you can reset your sandbox for a fresh round of development and testing. Resetting is also useful if you mess up and want to start from scratch.
Resetting the sandbox deletes the existing sandbox and creates a new one based on the settings of your current production instance of Zendesk Support. See How the sandbox works.
To reset the Enterprise sandbox
- Switch to the production instance of Zendesk Support.
- Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Manage > Sandbox.
- Click the Delete all edits and reset sandbox.
- In the warning window, click Reset sandbox. Or, click Cancel to discontinue the process.
When the sandbox is successfully reset, a new sandbox is created, and a new URL is assigned to it.
71 Comments
Is anybody else having issues with their Sandbox?
I have 2 brands created in mine and before the redesign I could choose which help centre I wanted to work in. Now I can't.
I also don't have the link anymore to submit requests.
Wondering if someone has something that will fix thins?
Hi Karen! I see you were able to get assistance with this in a ticket. Let us know if you need anything else!
To any who are evaluating the upgrade to enterprise with plans to utilize this feature:
The sandbox cannot copy from production, or be copied to production. The sandbox simply creates a second account that you can set up to look like your production but will require constant manual syncing. I would go so far as to say the sandbox in its current state is useless.
There really needs to be work done on the sandbox part of this.
@eball - I see that you also posted in the Product Feedback forum, which is the best place to give feedback to our Product Managers. Thanks for your detail and use case.
Hello there,
Is there any update regarding the Sandbox?
I find the Sandbox mostly to not be useful since I either will need to overwrite all settings with nothing (such as triggers, automations..... basically everything that is not copied from prod). Or I need to manually create everything, make a manual copy of prod to be able to test something which requires a lot of time.
This means that I need to make the most of my tests in prod which isn't a good thing.
Thanks!
Hi Emelie!
To the best of my knowledge there aren't any changes coming to Sandbox functionality, but I'm going to check with our Product Team to see if there's anything to share.
Hey Emelie!
I spoke with one of our Product Managers and it turns out that we're going to start researching this functionality sometime in the next few weeks. I added an official comment to this post with more information.
The TL;DR of it is that we're starting the research phase, we're going to be posting a hosted discussion with questions from the PM working on it where you can share all the details of your use case, and we don't have any timelines available at this stage.
I'd encourage you to follow that thread so you can get updated when the hosted discussion goes live!
Hi,
Also if we delete our sandbox will it start back again?...
have question about our sandbox...
we can't access the chat dashboard and when i try to enable it on our account there's a popup at the top right side saying
this what happen when i tried to access the chat dashboard...
Hi Roy,
Thanks for sharing the issues you're running into here. If you delete your sandbox and create a new one, it will start again. Meaning you will create a fresh new sandbox with all the current data and setups that were in your production account at the time of new sandbox creation. Hope that makes sense for you. Keep in mind that not everything is carried over to the Sandbox; this does include the chat channel.
Please refer to the article above to see what is and what is not included in the sandbox at time of creation.
As for the chat issue you noted above, I'm going to create a ticket for you regarding this so we can look into this together further from there. See you in the ticket. :)
Kind regards,
Amie
Hi Amie,
thank you..
one more question. will chat dashboard also reset if we delete all of our sandbox?..
Hi Rovi,
Yes the chat dashboard will be reset if you reset your current sandbox instance. You will need to reach out to us, for us to re-establish it for you on the new sandbox if you do go down that path. :)
Best,
Amie
Hi,
My IT department need to conduct some testing in our Sandbox but are not currently set up as Zendesk agents. Do I need to set them up as agents in order to access Sandbox? We currently do not have enough agent licences available and I would like to avoid buying additional licences if possible.
Hey Erin,
You'll need to add someone from your IT department as an agent to your sandbox so they can access it from there for their testing needs. There's a few spare agent seats available to use on your sandbox which you can use to create a login for them. No needs to purchase any additional licences at this point in time. :)
Best,
Amie
Hi Amie,
Thanks for that. How would my IT staff then log into the Sandbox if they are not allocated a licence? The only way I know how to log into the Sandbox is after I have logged into our Zendesk as an admin.
Hey Erin,
You can have them visit the sandbox URL directly, and log in through the Sandbox's Help Centre.
If you don't have a Sandbox Help Centre setup yet, I think you can access the sandbox with username and password by going to:
sandboxURL.zendesk.com/access/normal
That way, they don't need to have logins in your real zendesk, you can just make them agents in the sandbox.
Hello - is it possible to activate the Conditional Fields app in Sandbox?
Hi Crawford!
Yep - you can install the Conditional Fields app from the Apps Marketplace in your Sandbox just as you would in your production instance. The Conditional Fields app is available as a Professional Add-on (as part of the Productivity Pack Add-on) and on Enterprise. You can access the app here, then just select your Sandbox subdomain as the account where you'd like to install it.
Cheers!
quick question, can we also test integration with the sandbox, for example from our Salesforce sandbox?
Hi Nicolas,
Our SFDC integration can definitely be tested in a Sandbox (whether a Salesforce or Zendesk Sandbox)!
To install the Zendesk for Salesforce package into an SFDC Sandbox, you'll want to visit our Updates page and use this link:
https://test.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04t1W000000G0OK
The only difference is the use of test.salesforce.com instead of login.salesforce.com in the installation URL. Either installation location (prod/sandbox SFDC) may be pointed at either type of Zendesk URL (production or sandbox) - simply enter the relevant URL in the LINK DOMAIN section of the settings.
From the Zendesk side, the CRM tab has two separate configuration areas - one to link to a Production SFDC account, one to link to a Sandbox. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203660016-Salesforce-Installing-and-configuring-the-app-in-Zendesk-Support
A single Zendesk account may only send information to/pull information from a single Salesforce account. BUT a single SFDC instance can push information to multiple Zendesk domains as described herein: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115012910128-Multiple-Zendesk-domains-to-one-Salesforce-account
When you create a sandbox within Zendesk you may have noticed not all settings will be automatically synced to the sandbox. Very annoying if you want to adequately test whether the settings in your live environment are correct.
Let Premium+ keep your sandbox up to date so that you always have a test environment where you can test optimally in an exact copy of your live environment.
More info here
HELP!!!
I had an outside company given access to our sandbox to make some major changes to our theme,
Now that its done I dont see any way to manually move all their changes.
In fact I cant tell what they changed so that I can move it to production.
We cannot give an outside company access to our production so this is the only way we can do it.
How can I tell in the sandbox what changes were made so I can copy them all over Manually or automatically?
Do not say it cant be done. I see over a year ago they said they STARTED working on a fix for this and this has been a major complaint in zendesk for well over 2 years so dont tell me there is no solution Zendesk.
Hey Ronald,
Only way think I can think of is to run your Production help centre code and the sandbox code through something like Diffchecker.
You'd have to copy paste each template in manually though. It'd highlight changes between what you have now, and what is in the sandbox template and then you can decide you you'll manually copy the new code into the production HC
How do I turn off the Sandbox completely. To be clear, I am not talking about "resetting" it. I want it off so it does nothing. How is that accomplished?
Hey Emilio,
You should be able to completely cancel your Sandbox account the same way you would cancel your live Support account. First you'll log into your Sandbox account and then navigate to Admin>Settings>Account>Click here. You'll be direct to a page that asks to confirm cancellation and you should be all set afterwards.
Let me know if you run into any issues :)
We are using 4 brands in our Zendesk production environment, but in Sandbox, even though I set up 2 of the 4, I can only view our main default brand. How can I view other brands in Sandbox?
Hey Scott,
Just to confirm, are you trying to access the Help Center of your 2nd brand you've set up? Have you enabled the Help Center for your 2nd brand? You can find this option under Admin>Manage>Brands>(brand name). Screenshot below:
Once your brand has been created you can then navigate to your Help Center and select the Brand you'd like to view from the top left drop-down. Another screenshot below:
Let me know if you continue to experience issues :)
Hi Bret,
Yes, I set up the 2nd brand, just as you mentioned, with a subdomain name that was accepted, but for the 2nd step, the new brand does not appear (nor the drop down menu for brands). I even went so far as to reset the new brand to the Sandbox default, but still only see the original brand (and no drop down for brands).
Thanks for the clarification Scott.
I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf and pass this over to our Customer Advocacy team to assist further. You'll receive a follow-up email shortly stating your ticket has been created so feel free to reply back to that with any additional information you can provide.
Cheers!
Hi,
I have the same issue...it looks like the sandbox only displays 1 brand, no matter how many you set up. I'm on Enterprise, so in prod have up to 5 brands. It would be super to be able to replicate that in the sandbox environment...
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