Workflow recipe: Deploying an update to a trigger

What's my plan?

Premium sandboxes reduce risk by enabling you to create, update, and test changes, such as business rule configurations, in a sandbox environment that mirrors production. Deploying business rules from your premium sandbox further reduces risk and streamlines your process by providing a way to create, update, and test triggers and automations (beta) and then directly implement the same configurations in your production account. This feature speeds up the change management process, allowing you to stay focused on what matters most: delivering excellent customer experiences.

This recipe uses triggers and a premium sandbox.

This example includes:

• Workflow goal
• Modifying and testing a trigger in your sandbox
• Deploying the updated trigger configuration to production
• Verifying the success of the deployment

Workflow goal

Your company has decided their number-one priority this year is reliability and risk-reduction. As a Zendesk admin for the company account, you've decided to start using the premium sandbox deployments to test changes to business rules in a sandbox and then deploy them to production to reduce risk and disruption to your company's workflows. Now that you have your plan in place, it's time to put it to the test with your first trigger update.

Modifying and testing a trigger in your sandbox

Your company uses triggers to assign tickets from specific accounts to the individual agents who manage the accounts. However, this has led to problems in the past when agents take time off. Therefore, you've been asked to create groups of agents and then update the triggers to assign these account tickets to the respective group. This would let any agent in the group engage with the tickets as needed, even if they aren't the primary account manager.

To implement and test these changes in a sandbox environment, you do the following:

1. Create a new premium sandbox.
   Note: If you use an existing premium sandbox, be aware of the following limitations. Trigger deployments work only for premium sandboxes created on or after August 30, 2021. Automation deployments (beta) work only for premium sandboxes created on or after May 23, 2022. You can use the Sandboxes page to see when your sandbox was created.
2. Create the groups of agents.

   In this case, leadership defined the appropriate agent groupings for you. You create two new groups: VIP Account Managers and Standard Account Managers. Michael, Sravanthi, and Alain should be assigned to the VIP group; Jeffery, Miguel, and Tara should be assigned to the Standard group.

3. Update the triggers to assign work to the correct groups rather than individual agents.

   In this example, you update triggers that assigned work to Michael, Sravanthi, and Alain so they instead assign work to the VIP Account Managers group. Likewise, you update triggers that assigned work to Jeffery, Miguel, and Tara so they instead assign work to the Standard Account Managers group. This means removing the Ticket: Assignee action and replacing it with a Ticket: Group action.

4. Test the triggers within the sandbox environment to ensure they're working as intended.
   Note: In your sandbox environment, agents are created with example email addresses rather than the real ones used in production. This is to avoid conflicts and duplicated notifications. However, for testing purposes, you might want to use their real email addresses.

Deploying the updated trigger configuration to production

Deploying an updated trigger to production is relatively straightforward. However, in this scenario, you've introduced new dependencies into your sandbox environment that don't exist in your production account: the VIP Account Managers and Standard Account Managers groups.

To deploy your updated trigger to production

1. In your production account, go to Admin Center, click Account in the sidebar, and then select Sandbox > Deployment.
2. Select Trigger as the configuration type.
3. Select your new sandbox as the sandbox from which you'll deploy the trigger.
4. Locate the first trigger you want to deploy, then click Next.
5. Resolve your dependencies, then click Next.

   The first trigger you deploy to production will have two missing dependencies. To resolve this, you must create the VIP Account Managers and Standard Account Managers groups in production. If you are deploying more than one trigger as part of this change, these groups won't be missing for subsequent deployments, but you might have other dependencies to resolve.

6. Review your mapped dependencies and click Deploy.
7. Repeat steps 1–6 for each updated trigger you need to deploy.

Verifying the success of the deployment

After clicking Deploy, you're notified that the configuration was successfully deployed to your production account. However, it's always a good idea to go look at the updated business rule itself to ensure everything looks right. Go to the Triggers page, find the trigger you deployed an update to, and check its actions. You can also look at the trigger's revision history if you want to compare the previous behavior.