With any of these plans, you can also contact your sales representative or Zendesk Customer Support to purchase additional premium sandbox instances.
Premium Sandbox provides a test environment that mirrors your production instance of Zendesk Support or the help desk functionality in Zendesk Suite in configuration and, potentially, data. This allows you to accurately test updates to workflows, experiment with integrations, and provide training for new agents in an environment that closely mirrors the production environment.
This article contains the following topics:
Premium Sandbox set up choices
Premium sandboxes allow you to copy the configuration and tickets from your production environment. It also enables you to create and run more than one sandbox at a time
When creating a premium sandbox, you can choose from these setup options: metadata, partial, and production. The content copied for all levels includes the following:
- Brands
- Dynamic content
- Ticket fields
- Ticket forms
- User fields
- Organization field
- Targets
- Groups
- Custom roles
- Shared views
- Shared macros
- Triggers
- Automations
- Agent level users
- Group memberships
When you create a partial premium sandbox, up to 10,000 of the following objects can be copied:
- End users
- Organizations
- Tickets
- End users
- Organizations
- Tickets
For more information about creating and managing premium sandboxes, see Managing Premium Sandboxes.
Understanding replication
Replication occurs automatically when you create a sandbox through Admin Center. The replication retrieves data from the production instance and then creates the configuration and content in the sandbox, creating a new subdomain. The process will not affect the performance of your production instance. Data is only retrieved from the production instance, so nothing will be added, updated, or deleted there. The configuration of your sandbox instance will change rapidly while the replication is occurring so it is best to not use it during the process.
The time to complete a replication varies depending on the amount of content involved. A simple metadata copy with a small amount of fields and business rules can take less time. A full copy with 100,000 tickets and their associated users and organizations can take a week or more to complete. When the replication is complete, the status of the sandbox changes to Active.
To complete the replication, Zendesk creates an internal copy of the data to be migrated. Once this migration is complete, this copy is deleted. A deleted Premium Sandbox is not recoverable.
Your choice of sandbox determines the maximum number of replications you can perform per month, as well as how long your sandbox and its data are persisted in the event you do not use your sandbox for a significant period of time. When you do not use your sandbox, the sandbox, and its data are deleted after a 30-day or a 90-day period of disuse.
This table describes the maximum number of replications you can perform per month for a sandbox, and how long sandboxes are retained:
| Standard | Premium - metadata copy | Premium - partial copy | Premium - production copy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maximum number of replications per month | 1 | 5 | 10 | 15 |
| Sandbox data retention | 30 days | 30 days | 90 days | 90 days |
Limitations on replicated data
The replication will be as close of an exact copy of the production instance as possible. However, there are several situations where the copy cannot be exact:
- Sandbox test environments apply to Zendesk Support and Help Center functionality in Zendesk Suite only and do not include, for example, Guide or Help Center content.
- Brands are replicated, but since brand names need to be unique across all Zendesk instances, they cannot be an exact match. The brand names will be modified to contain a unique string.
- User emails will be invalidated before being added to the sandbox instance by the use of the @example.com domain. This is to prevent emails from being inadvertently sent to your users. This includes both agents and end-users. An administrator can reverse the invalid emails for testing by editing the users' email addresses.
- APIs are enabled, but API tokens must be recreated.
- Apps and EAP functionality are disabled within the sandbox.
- Open tickets are migrated, but archived closed tickets, linked incident tickets, and ticket sharing agreements are not.
- Targets requiring a password will be replicated, but they will have invalid credentials and be in a disabled state.
- Any objects that are broken in production will not be replicated. For example, a trigger with a condition which refers to an organization that no longer exists will not be replicated to the sandbox.
- External email addresses are not copied to the sandbox.
- Changes made within a premium sandbox are not copied automatically into the production account and must be manually reproduced within the production account.
- Only the items identified in this article are replicated.
19 Comments
Wondering why this is a separate product, and not just the "standard". Surely, everyone wants to test against a true representation of their instance?
Hi Chris,
Sandbox users do have the ability to test with settings similar to their Production site, however, unless you have the add-on you would need to manually configure this through the agent interface or the Rest API.
There are some cases where customers will use their Sandbox account to test account features without affecting their Production site. Therefore duplicating account settings may not be necessary in that scenario.
I understand the need for having this process automated but unfortunately this is only available with the Premium Sandbox add-on. If you're interested in having this feature available on the standard sandbox I would encourage you add your feedback to our Support Product Feedback forum for our Product Managers to review.
Appreciate you taking the time to share this with us!
This add-on feels more like it should be a standard feature or included at least on top tiers. Does these sandbox options allow to move instance from sandbox to production?
In todays world, ALL major providers provide a sandbox comprehensively, how you guys have not done this yet is beyond me.
We are having to look at other alternatives or build one if Zendesk don't get their act together. This fact alone could be leading many organisations to drop this service.
I find this utterly disappointing as a developer and its causing major issues with our system and your integration.
Hopefully Zendesk will sort this out before they start to loose a lot of customers.
Agree with Paul, this should be standard, especially given how much we already pay for our Enterprise Agent licenses. Pricing model from Zendesk actually forces people to look at alternatives and we will be doing exactly that next year.
How much does this cost? I can't find pricing anywhere! There's no way I'll talk with a Sales Rep either.
What about Conditions within Forms? How are those replicated/ copied from production to sandbox?
Not having this feature as standard stimys belief really. But then Zendesk know it would be useful, so charge for it. Simples.
Unfortunate that even a one-time copy of these settings requires a complete service level upgrade. There isn't even an individual price. I DO think that this should be standard but I'm even willing to pay for it once, if needed. I'm NOT willing to pay a significant increase to an ongoing fee for this, especially if all I need is the settings to be copied once. What I want doesn't seem to be an option. Subscription pricing equals a poor customer experience in this situation.
Is it possible to update a sandbox instance with production settings? I know it says that changes in production don't passively get synced into the sandbox instance, but is it possible to trigger this manually?
Hey Lanny,
There's no manual button that will allow for you to sync the data from your production account to the Sandbox account. This is a one time sync only that occurs when you create your Sandbox account.
The only other option you would have would be to use the Rest API along with a script to create those settings in your Sandbox account.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Having just used this for the first time, there are a number of things that I think are important to know -
1. Before you use this you must delete any existing sandbox. This is a huge leap of faith for those of us with very customized instances. Luckily for me, I have multiple instances and was able to work with a newer one with less overhead than our main instance. If I had used this with that one I would have been extremely unhappy.
2. Although a number of items were created, they were not usable as is and required significant review to get correct: Not all views were created, triggers were not in the correct order, customer lists were not created, etc.
3. Custom ticket fields do not have the same field numbers and any reference to those fields will be incorrect. So references within emails to to a custom field must be reviewed and revised; also triggers, automations, and anything else.
4. All agent login emails are changed. That's not a problem except that the passwords are also changed, so an agent can't log in with the changed email to reset their password or their email. An administrator must manually change either the password or the email for each agent that will be using the sandbox. If you have a lot of agents and light agents this can be a huge time waste.
5. The sandbox doesn't include even a stripped-down version of the Guide, so there's no way to test/train using a new request form.
Given these restrictions, it's not as easy as we are lead to believe to create a new test or training environment. Using my starter instance it took many days to confirm that everything was the same as production. For the primary instance, which has over 150 triggers, macros, and views, over 30 custom fields and 10 forms with conditions, I'm not sure that this is usable as is. If I need to review every item I'd rather maintain the existing sandbox and review anything that's changed. In my opinion, this needs more work to be usable for anyone maintaining a more complicated system.
I also forgot to mention that your sandbox will disappear if you don't use it within a certain amount of time, so if you use it twice a year for training or testing, all the work you've done to get it set up will be wiped out by the next time you want to use it, so even if there were no changes you need to start from scratch and check everything again.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. I am very interested to see the response to your comments, Virginia! We have just this week upgraded our account to the new Enterprise Suite plan from an older mix of Professional and Enterprise features. We look forward to taking advantage of the many new features and functionality. However, the new Premium Sandbox, which initially appeared as quite an advantage, is now seeming to be more of a major concern. Having been "burned" when resetting the Sandbox a couple of years ago to take advantage of new features - and then realizing it deleted all the Sandboxes we had created for various brands as well as creating a new URL that was very inconvenient for developers working in the Sandboxes and APIs, I am hesitant to even test this out until more information is provided about what to expect in our situation.
I wanted to provide a bit of an update. We did receive confirmation from a Zendesk product manager that the creation of a new premium partial sandbox would not delete and did not require us to delete our existing sandbox. So we have started the process of creating a new sandbox, and it is still in progress. It has taken over 2 hours so far and is not completed yet. We will begin testing soon.
@sally, Can you confirm how long the "in progress" status lasted? I am still waiting for my sandbox to become active.
Hi Lindsay Grove - the sandbox did finally complete processing overnight. It probably took over 4 hrs in total...but I'm not sure. Hope that is helpful.
@Sally - Thanks for the updated information. When we created our sandbox account back in February there was no way to get the "Create Sandbox" button other than deleting our original sandbox and starting over. I'm so glad they changed that!
Retraction of previous statement! We have 3 Zendesk instances, all Enterprise. The newest one, created in 2021, gives me the option to create more than one Sandbox, BUT only after I had removed the old one. The two older instances do not give me the option to create a new sandbox - the button is greyed out. I'm assuming that if I delete the current sandbox I'll be able to create a new one, and hopefully that means I'll be able to create more than one, but I'm not going to test it. Both of them are too customized to delete if I have to re-create them from basically from scratch.
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