Premium sandbox provides a test environment that closely mirrors your production instance 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 overview
- Support Enterprise includes one standard sandbox.
- Suite Enterprise includes one standard sandbox and one partial premium sandbox.
- Suite Enterprise Plus includes one standard sandbox and one full production premium sandbox.
Additional premium sandboxes can be purchased as an add-on.
- Brands
- Dynamic content
- Ticket fields
- Ticket forms
- User fields
- Organizations (only organizations referenced in configurations and tickets for express sandboxes)
- Organization fields (only for organizations referenced in configurations and tickets for express sandboxes)
- Targets (set to inactive in the sandbox by default)
- Groups
- Custom roles
- Shared views
- Shared macros
- Triggers
- Trigger categories
- Automations
- Agents
- Group memberships
- Support addresses (Internal support addresses, such as help@mybusiness.zendesk.com, are copied with slight modification to contain the brand's unique subdomain within the sandbox. If you've configured external support addresses, such as help@mybusiness.com, they're converted to internal addresses when replicated to a sandbox using the following structure: help-at-mybusiness-com@sandboxsubdomain.zendesk.com. If you've set an external support address as the default, the sandbox reverts to using the original default internal address: support@mybusinesssandbox.zendesk.com.)
- Webhooks (set to inactive in the sandbox by default)
- Apps (only free Marketplace apps that don't require authentication or additional configuration at installation)
- Custom objects (this doesn't include custom object records, lookup fields related to custom objects, or legacy custom objects)
For more information about data replication, see About Zendesk sandbox environments. To understand exactly what data was and wasn't successfully replicated for a particular premium sandbox, see Generating a creation report for a premium sandbox.
Additionally, it is possible to update existing sandboxes to reflect subscription changes to Zendesk products and add-ons. No other data can be updated after a sandbox is created. See Syncing product and add-on data to sandboxes.
Creating a premium sandbox through replication
Replication occurs automatically when you create a premium sandbox through Admin Center. The replication retrieves data from the production instance and 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. For a complete list of the data that is replicated, see Understanding premium sandboxes.
The configuration of your sandbox instance will change rapidly while the replication is occurring, so we recommend waiting to use it until the replication completes. The time it takes for a replication to complete varies depending on the amount of content involved. A simple metadata copy with a small amount of fields and business rules takes less time, ranging from a few minutes to a few days. A full copy with 100,000 tickets and the related users and organizations can take up to a week or more to complete. When the replication is complete, the status of the sandbox changes to Active.
To create a premium sandbox
- Before creating a new sandbox, make sure you've configured a default group for your account.
- In Admin Center, click
Account in the sidebar, then select Sandbox > Sandboxes.
- Click the Create Sandbox button.
- Enter a Name that describes your sandbox.
- Select your preferred sandbox to set up. You can only select sandbox types that
are available in your plan or that you've purchased as an add-on.
- Standard Sandbox - A standard sandbox with none of your settings, business rules, or tickets.
- Premium Sandbox - Metadata - A copy of your production settings and business rules, but no tickets
- Premium Sandbox - Partial / Production - A copy of your production settings, business rules, and tickets.
- (Optional) When creating a premium sandbox, you can choose to Enable express
sandbox, which copies only organization data referenced in your
configurations, such as business rules and tickets.
The more organizations you have, the longer it takes to replicate your data when creating premium sandboxes. This option is recommended if you have 100,000 organizations or more. For example, if you have two million organizations, creating a premium partial or production sandbox could take four days, whereas creating it as an express sandbox could reduce that time to hours.
- If you selected Premium Sandbox - Partial / Production, you must also
select the number of tickets to copy to the sandbox.
- Up to 10,000 tickets - The maximum number of unclosed tickets you can copy with the Zendesk Suite Enterprise plan. This is referred to as a partial copy.
- Up to 100,000 tickets - The maximum number of unclosed tickets you can copy with the Zendesk Suite Enterprise Plus plan. This is referred to as a full production copy.
- Click Create.
You will see a message that your sandbox is being created. When your sandbox is successfully created, a message appears at the top of the page, and the status of the sandbox becomes Active. The sandbox has a unique URL with a ten-digit number after your domain name.
You can access a creation report for 30 days following the creation of a premium sandbox. This report contains details about most of the production data that Zendesk attempted to replicate in the sandbox, including explanations for anything that failed to replicate. See Generating a creation report for a premium sandbox.
With your newly-replicated sandbox, you will have an environment that closely mirrors your production instance. This enables you to test out new workflows, give your agents a safe place to train, and provide a high-quality environment for development purposes. See Managing premium sandboxes.
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46 comments
Diego Bechi
re: Apps and EAP functionality are disabled within the sandbox.
I have a question about it. is there any way to create the sandbox account with all the Apps I have in production? (besides doing it manually)
For context, I'm trying to replicate the same UI & functionality from production in order to test it as a whole while adding new internal developed apps. For now I have been adding the apps one by one which takes time if you have quite a few.
Thanks!
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Dekbi
Since the App functionality is disabled in the Sandbox instance, I'm afraid that the |apps installed will also not be replicated from the production to your Sandbox. You may need to re-install them manually for UI purposes but functionality will not be guaranteed to work.
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Harihar Jobanputra
I could not find an answer for this.
When you create a partial premium sandbox, up to 10,000 non-closed tickets and associated end users will be copied. how does it handle PII and sensitive information in those tickets? Notes?
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Shaun Luong
What is the "standard" sandbox in the Note at the top of this article? Is it the "metadata premium" sandbox described in the article? If so, you should change the terminology to make it consistent.
Also, if sandboxes do not replicate Guide, is there a way to keep drafts of existing articles to be published at a later date?
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Harihar Jobanputra
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Chuck Hemesath
I just created a Sandbox to be used as a testing tool for some new customer care agents. I have Zendesk Enterprise Suite so essentially it allows me to generate a full production replica in the sandbox. One thing I noticed it doesn't fully replicate is that only 4 of the 8 ticket forms that we use were replicated. Unfortunately, those 4 were not any of the ticket forms I really needed to be replicated. Does anyone know why this may be happening or how I can ensure that all (or at least the forms I want) are replicated? I have stared at this for a while now and cannot figure out the logic as to why it is pulling the forms that it is and not the others.
Anyone else experience this?
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Chad Susa (Gravity CX - Zendesk Partner)
Hi Chuck Hemesath
Not sure this helps any but I recently had a similar issue. The premium sandbox replicated our production instance but not all of the business rules (triggers) were replicated. I have no idea why this didn't replicate correctly and TBH haven't followed it up with Zendesk.
Just thought I'd add it here as well.
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Chuck Hemesath
Chad Susa (Gravity CX - Zendesk Partner), sounds like the same problem, different symptom. I have not been able to figure out any sort of logic as to why some things are being copied while other/similar things are not. It's been a real show stopper for us as we really need for these particular ticket forms to be replicated in the sandbox and for some reason they are not being replicated. Very frustrating.
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Hiedi Kysther
Hi Chuck Hemesath
Investigating this kind of issue requires reviewing our logs. So, in order for us to assist you further - I have created a ticket on your behalf. One of our advocates will reach out to you to further assist you on this.
Have a great day!
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Joey
It seems like ticket sharing triggers are not copied over, any other type of triggers that won't copy over to the sandbox?
Prod: 378 - Sandbox: 347 = 31 missing triggers.
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Christine Diego
I would suggest to contact Zendesk Customer Support to further check your account.
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Basyl Durnan
I want to chime in about what a few others stated—no Guide replication. We have third-party integrations in our Guide and a preview isn't sufficent. So we are copying everything over manually to a sandbox environment.
1
Christine Diego
Hi Basyl,
In both Standard and Premium Sandboxes customers should be able to enable a Help Center if the subscription allows it. Sandboxes get the production account’s subscription at creation time. If the customer created a Sandbox before purchasing Guide then you will need to recreate the sandbox. Note that only the subscription is copied. Nothing in terms of Guide(/Help Center) config/setup is copied.
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Joey
As suspected the documentation is lacking the clarification that ticket sharing fields are considered inactive fields and thus don't sync over.
I mean, how can we embrace the whole deploying from Sandbox to Production if triggers are missing, without any clarification in the UI.
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Robert Bullen
This is not a great feature set if it doesn't replicate the Guide. The thing that is most front facing for the customer can't be tested or structured before being pushed to production.
3
Samuel Bird
I have a couple of massive issues with this feature as it stands, your SSO system has no way to be transferred over seamlessly. This means for a system such as ours where we have no Zendesk Logins only the SSO set-up that we cannot access the sandbox without going back and setting up Zendesk Authentication in prod which would break our security requirements. The other large issue is that you cannot access a prod version of the guide, the only reason I was going to use a sandbox was for in-development sections of our guide environment before launching them.
Frankly, as it stands with the amount of issues people have listed in the comments this feature hardly seems useful when it should be one of the most important ones you have.
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