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Sandbox environments do not reflect prod



Posted Oct 20, 2022

Feature request summary

When a sandbox is created, it captures the production environment as it is at the moment of sandbox creation. If changes are made in production, the changes do not reflect on the sandbox. In order for the sandbox to reflect production, the sandbox will need to be deleted and re-created.

Use cases

  1. A sandbox is made
  2. A custom workflow is developed on the sandbox before pushing to production
  3. During the custom build, it is discovered that a change in production must be made to accommodate the custom workflow
  4. The change is made in production, but does not show in the sandbox
  5. The sandbox must be re-created in order to test the workflow again, even for a small configuration change
  6. We must start from square one on the sandbox account

Impact of limitation or missing feature

We have several teams working on custom workflows and configuration on a sandbox account at once, and we need to make tweaks to the configuration in order to accommodate custom workflows or changes in our needs. Because the sandbox does not update with production, we have to delete and re-create the sandbox every time, which means every developer or engineer working in sandbox must re-create everything they have already done. Because of this, we do not have a true, stable staging environment which severely impacts our ability to build and maintain our Zendesk instance.


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7 comments

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Kai B

Zendesk Luminary

+1 to this. We have several ongoing large scale projects to integrate systems into our sandbox. During this time, we are also making BAU changes to our live environment - as we don't put everything into the sandbox as there is no push to live, meaning we'd have to build out everything twice. 

I want to refresh my sandbox without impacting the build on the integrations so they have a live like environment to work and test on (avoiding potential risks to cutover), but this is not possible because the only way I can refresh is to delete my current environment and create a new one

Ideally this could be solved by having an auto replicated pre-prod environment which is used for final testing and the ability to promote changes from sandbox to pre-prod to live. Appreciate that's a big ask, so for now I would settle with the ability to refresh the sandbox to capture new configuration

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Absolutely this. We test integrations with considerable configuration in our sandbox and have to recreate them every time. If we want to keep our sandbox up to date, we have to rely on third-party products.

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Aaron C. I'm curious, what third-party products do you use to keep your sandbox up to date?

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Maddie F. We are testing Salto but are not currently paying for their product.

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Salto is a great alternative, you need a budget for this.

Another alternative is to use the premium sandbox addon.

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Daniel Elizalde We have the premium sandbox but in order to replicate you have to delete and create a new one. That process can take a full week according to documentation depending on volume of data that is getting replicated. So on top of a 6-figure/yr product we have to buy another product to keep our sandbox up to date? Maybe that is status quo.

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Daniel Elizalde We also have the premium sandbox, but as Aaron said, we still need to delete the sandbox and create a new one if we want the sandbox to mirror our production instance, or we need to apply the changes made in prod to the sandbox manually.

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