What is the Sandboxes Deploy Triggers Early Access program and how do I use it?

Sandboxes are useful for trying out new things and helping with change management. Creating a change in a sandbox and then testing meant that you knew what was going to happen in your production Account without impacting customers. However, migrating these changes from a Sandbox to your production Account has always been a manual process. Good practice was having two windows with the Admin copying the configuration from one to the other.

That's where the new Deploy Triggers come in.

Deploy Triggers is an exciting new feature for Premium Sandboxes which enables you to copy Trigger configuration from a Sandbox back into your production Account. The process of change management for Triggers and their dependencies is a simple push-button solution. These deployments allow you to have control over what is copied, removing any manual keying errors and speeding up the time to deploy changes.

How does Deploy Triggers work?

In Admin Center, navigate to Sandboxes and click on the Deployment link.

Select the sandbox in which the trigger you want to deploy lives

Select the trigger you want to deploy, and click on the Deploy link

Click on the Deploy trigger button

Congratulations you just deployed a trigger to Production!

Supported use cases for this EAP

For this initial release we are supporting the following use cases:

Creating new Triggers with existing dependencies
Updating existing Triggers and existing dependencies

Note: A trigger dependency is a Condition or an Action. E.g. a status, brand, type, priority, channel or ticket. Anything you can select as a dependency or action.

⚠️ We do not yet support the creation of new dependencies in Sandboxes, we have a solution in the works. E.g. this is where you might create a new organisation in your sandbox and use it in a Trigger. As a work-around, if you create this new organization in your Production Account then create the sandbox you would have the Organization in the Sandbox for use.

What gets deployed from the Sandbox to your production Account?

The selected trigger and its dependencies are copied from the sandbox to your account. We don’t yet handle any new dependencies that have been created in a sandbox. This means if you want to add a new dependency (e.g. org) you should create this in your production Account before you create the Sandbox.

How to roll back changes

If you have deployed a change and you need to reverse the change, you can rollback by following these steps:

Navigate to the trigger that you want to roll back

Click on Revision History and open this in another window

Select the version you want to revert to

Update the triggers fields to reflect the old changes and save

How do I get started with the EAP?

First, sign up! 😉 We plan to get new accounts going as soon as we can.

Once you get confirmation that you've been enrolled in the EAP you can begin Deploying Triggers from Sandbox to Production.

Who can sign up for the EAP?

This EAP is available to all customers with access to Premium Sandboxes.

We would love your feedback!

This is an Early Access Program and we expect that there may be some bugs in the system. We'd appreciate any feedback and reproduction steps if you run into unexpected issues.

If you have any thoughts, wishes, dreams or any other Sandboxes related feedback please leave it in this community forum. We are looking forward to it!

When will other Business Rules be available?

We have been busy building out the new Deploy feature and have a backlog full of enhancements to improve the process. We are planning to start work on other Business Rules in the upcoming months and will share progress.

Stephen

April 28, 2022 16:22

Hi,

This sounds absolutely fantastic! We try to ensure everything is tested in a Sandbox before deploying in Production.

Will this feature be available in Standard Sandboxes or is this a feature of Premium Sandboxes only?

Best regards,
Stephen

Dan Cooper

May 04, 2022 17:51

Community Moderator

This looks like a great start. I have a few questions:

If we have two sandboxes, can we deploy from one sandbox to another? In our case, specifically dev (standard sandbox) > stage (premium sandbox) > production

How does this match an existing trigger from a sandbox to production?

How is trigger ordering considered into the deployment? If we have triggers that need to be deployed in a specific order, does this have a way to account for that systematically or do we need to account for re-ordering after deploy?

Richard Low

May 10, 2022 01:46

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey Stephen

It really is going to make changes easier. The push & deploy features are going to be for Premium Sandboxes.

May 10, 2022 01:57

Hey @Dan Cooper

We're starting with Sandbox -> Account deployments, but you have guessed at other functionality of sandbox -> sandbox deployments. We want to be as flexible for different modes of change management e.g. single / multi-environment. Sandbox -> sandbox is a future release as is Production -> sandbox which will be used for environment refreshes.

How does this match an existing trigger from a sandbox to production?

The matching is done as part of the checking. At the creation of a sandbox we also create the look-up in ZIS Links. This lookup is then used at the time of deployment for ID mapping, all API driven.

How is trigger ordering considered into the deployment? If we have triggers that need to be deployed in a specific order, does this have a way to account for that systematically or do we need to account for re-ordering after deploy?

For existing triggers that have been edited in a sandbox, we maintain the same trigger order. For newly created triggers in a Sandbox the trigger in production will need to be reordered. We are early days with deployments and want to get to a point where we can control the trigger ordering at the time of deployment.

With the types of changes you make, what are your pain points?