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How do I share feedback on the Sandbox Configuration Management EAP?

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

Posted Dec 16, 2024

Use this community forum

We'd like to keep feedback as social and collaborative as possible, so we invite you to follow this community forum too.

 

If we see that there is a topic of general interest, then we'll post about it here and invite everyone to provide their feedback. Likewise, you're welcome to ask questions or provide feedback at any time through this topic. 

 

Suggested guidelines for giving feedback

We value your feedback, no matter what it is. We encourage you to tell us what you like, dislike, and where you could see improvements. We'd like to see a healthy forum for discussion, but we can't do that without just a little bit of effort from everyone. 

 

Here are a couple of pointers that will really help us understand your feedback and work with you to make this EAP even better:

  • When you see something you dislike or see something you'd like improved, write it down and think about it for a little while.
  • Try to be as clear as possible in your feedback; explain why you like/dislike something, and how it could be improved. 
  • Be patient when waiting for responses from Zendesk.
  • Don't use sarcasm, be rude to other customers or staff, and don't use strong language. We will moderate forum posts where we think reasonable.

Ultimately, we want this topic to be a place where any customer can come and share feedback related to the Sandbox Configuration Management EAP.


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11 comments

Very excited for the EAP features to start rolling out. 

 

The first thing that comes to mind for inspection is to include the ability to export different top level categories (eg macros, triggers, etc) as JSON.  We need to de-dupe and cull redundant triggers, but paginating through page after page of triggers takes a toll on our API limits, causing 429s and botched runs. 

 

A nice-to-have would be links out to the API dev reference on respective tabs. For instance, when viewing the JSON of a ticket form, a link to https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/ticketing/tickets/ticket_forms/

 

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Michael

Zendesk LuminaryUser Group Leader

Its Day 1 for me looking into this new Sandbox Configuration EAP. I like what I see so far. 

 

A couple of comments. 

 

1. It allows you the see the JSON associated with Macros, Views, etc. Very helpful if you want to use with APIs and you might not know how to write the body. Also good for making backups.

 

2. Reading the configuration for the first time took more then 20 seconds. I am sure it will get better over time.

 

3. The different “sections” are well laid out and seem logical. When this is GA, it would be great to have a Reference guide like they have for triggers and search so you understand the impact of each area.

 

4. The search and filter by environment is helpful. 

 

Looking forward to the next phases!

 

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It's a huge step foward for Zendesk! I was able to see many challenges faced by clients who use both sandbox and production instances and need to keep them in sync.

 

One thing I'm curious about: would it be possible to export these configurations from a sandbox environment, edit them in another tool, and then deploy/import them into production?

I mention this because, if there's a way to implement a validation process for moving content from sandbox to production, I believe you would address a significant pain point for large clients.

 

 

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Really exciting feature development. This is a big step forward for sandbox and environment management.

My initial takeaways from enrolling in the EAP:

  • Initial load of our production file took approx. 6-9 minutes to load, now takes 20ish seconds to reload on switching environments.
  • LOVE search, particularly that search is retained when switching environments
  • Some of the naming of features are different from admin interface to config output e.g. “contextual workspace” vs. “workspace”
  • Looks like this only includes ACTIVE attributes. I would love to be able to filter on this and see INACTIVE results to quickly check between environments where something is built vs. inactive vs. active.
     

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

mfg thanks for the feedback. Exporting the config data is an interesting idea. I'm curious how you see the de-duping aspect working? Would it be something you do outside of the app?

 

With regards to the API limits, are you finding the pagination in the product is causing you 429s? If you wanted to email me your subdomain, I'd be happy to take a look at this for you.

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

Michael. Thank you so much for the feedback. I really appreciate it.

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

Lucas Macedo (Salto) thanks for your post.

 

Exporting configs is an interesting idea. We hadn't considered doing this so you could make updates to the config offline. Not sure what edge-cases that might raise but it's something I'll pass onto the team. 

 

Later versions of this product will allow you to deploy between environments so that should go a long way to helping customers keep their environments in sync.

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

JB Thanks for your feedback.

 

The initial load really shouldn't take that long. If you wanted to email me your subdomain, I'd be happy to get someone to look into it. Glad you found the search feature helpful. 

 

Consistent naming is definitely something we want to work on, so I've taken note of that. 

 

With the active/inactive attributes, can you give me an example of what you mean? Are you looking at the list of say triggers, and they only show the active triggers? Or are you referring to something else here? 

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

عطا يوسف if you want to join the EAP, you can sign up here
 

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Carl Joseph  - For cleaning up triggers, I think I would probably want to loop through the triggers and run multiple tests - eg identify ones that perform an action or are conditioned on a field that isn't active or a value that has been deleted. For looking quickly at triggers, JSON is much easier to read and compare relative to the existing process of opening tab after tab of trigger pages and scrolling through them so I'm glad to be able to view them this way.

For a more in depth analysis, I would probably manage this externally with Tray.io. Doing this kind of analysis live would drain our API call limits (unless we added delays in the calls, which would cause the job to run forever). Using a single static file for these assets, rather than hammering end points would also reduce the complexity of the analysis. 

 

One major issue with the Inspection feature for export would be the need for the object's actual ID data. Access to the ID would be a requirement for me to make full use of the data presented.

For instance, when you pull up a field or a form JSON, it doesn't include the respective ID: 

In forms, it also includes the array of “ticket_field_ids”, but they are the titles of the fields not the actual numeric IDs: 

In general, the JSON displayed is less robust that the actual schema for the assets (21 properties vs 11):

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Carl Joseph

Zendesk Product Manager

mfg This is super helpful. Thank you for taking the time to describe it so clearly. I agree that `id` would be quite useful, especially if you want to export things and work with it outside of Zendesk.  

 

I've taken note of this internally and will see what we can include in our roadmap.

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