The Support Enterprise plan provides two help desk instances: a customer-facing production instance and a test environment instance known as the standardsandbox. Use the sandbox to test, learn, and make mistakes before making your changes public. For example, you can use the sandbox to test and fine-tune new templates and branding without affecting your customers.
You can create a new sandbox anytime you want, but you can only have one sandbox at a time. After you're done with testing and deploying your changes, you can reset the sandbox for a fresh round of development.
If you want to replicate information from your production instance, you can upgrade to a Zendesk Suite Enterprise or Enterprise Plus plan to get apremium sandboxinstead. If you need more than one sandbox at a time, you can purchase one or more premium sandboxes for your Support Enterprise plan.
You manage your sandbox inAdmin Center. This article describes how to use Admin Center to create and work with your sandbox.
This article contains the following topics:
How the sandbox works
The sandbox takes the following settings from your production instance of Zendesk Support. This matching ensures your starting point is as close to the current production instance as possible.
- Templates (standard emails, welcome emails, etc.)
- Branding (colors, account names, etc.)
- Settings (channels, agent permissions, etc.)
Any changes you make in the sandbox are not copied to your production environment. Once you're satisfied with the changes, you must reproduce them manually in the production instance. If you need to configure additional syncing from production to your sandbox, you can do so using ourREST API.
You can start a trial in your sandbox for another Zendesk product, such as Chat. Any trial is subject to limitations and has a fixed time limit, as specified when you sign up for the trial. These trials are maintained as separate accounts. They are not included as part of the sandbox.
Sandboxes created after May 2023 include a Talk trial of an unlimited duration as long as the production account has an active Talk subscription or trial. The sandbox Talk trial will be suspended when the Talk credits run out.
The production instance owner is listed as the sandbox owner by default. This is true even if another admin creates or replaces the sandbox.
The standard sandbox does not replicate the following items:
- Help Center content and customizations
- Zendesk Talk data
- Zendesk Chat data and customizations
- Security settings (including SSO)
- API tokens
- Apps and integrations
- Conditional fields
- Twitter user identities
- Zendesk Support triggers, automations and custom fields
沙箱复制不包括物品,如布鲁里溃疡siness rules, views, macros, groups, orgs, custom fields, users, user fields, and tickets. Additionally, the Zendesk Agent Workspace is disabled in new sandbox environments by default, but can beactivated manually.
Creating a sandbox
Before using your sandbox you must initialize it. The sandbox is created with settings from your current production instance of Zendesk Support.
To create a sandbox
- InAdmin Center, click
Accountin the sidebar, then selectSandbox > Sandboxes. - Click theCreate Sandboxbutton.
- Enter aNamethat describes your sandbox.
- ClickCreate.
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 becomesActive.The sandbox has a unique URL with a ten-digit number after your domain name.
Working in your sandbox
To switch to the sandbox from the production instance of Zendesk Support
- InAdmin Center, clickAccountin the sidebar, then selectSandbox > Sandboxes.
- Click the options menu (
), then selectOpen Sandboxto launch the sandbox instance in a new browser tab. You can also bookmark the sandbox and access it from your browser.
- Sign in to the sandbox with your normal administrator credentials.
- Make changes, test, and fine-tune.
Replacing your sandbox
After you're done with a round of testing and updates, you can create a new sandbox for a fresh round of development and testing. Creating a new sandbox is also useful if you mess up and want to start from scratch.
You can have a single sandbox at a time. A typical procedure would be to delete the existing sandbox and create a new one based on the settings of your current production instance of Zendesk Support. SeeHow the sandbox works.
To replace your sandbox
- InAdmin Center, clickAccountin the sidebar, then selectSandbox > Sandboxes.
- Click the options menu (), then selectDelete Sandbox.
- Create a new sandbox using the steps inCreating a sandbox.
A new sandbox is created with a new URL.
37 Comments
@...It would be great to see that article you liked to. Unfortunately, I get an error message that says I don't have permission.
Is there any update on being able to deploy from Sandbox to Production?
Hi Kim –
I've updated the link in Jessie's earlier comment, as it was pointing to an older post that had been archived. Here's where to add your use case:Need functionality to move changes from Sandbox to Production
@...Thank you! Much appreciated.
Hey@..., I don't seem to have permission to view the product feedback page - any idea why?
We're preparing to refresh our sandbox now, and it's a big headache - a refresh option that would refresh business rules and ticket behavior settings without wiping URL, API tokens, OAuth clients, and all of these other things that various testing integrations depend on would really be great.
Hi Charlie, we often will archive old product feedback threads that haven't had any comments recently. I've un-archived it, so now's your chance! The link should work again.
Our team is using Sandbox to build out a chatbot. We've been able to create an API client in the production environment but when we created a new sandbox the API client is not copied over.
How can we use API in a Sandbox setting? Does the API not copy over or function in Sandbox?
Hey Nathania,
When you're referring to an 'api client' are you referring to an api token or the ZAFClient?
Appreciate the clarification!
Have a wonderful day!
Eric Nelson | Manager - Developer Advocacy
Hello! I have an enterprise account and I just created a sandbox. The problem that I saw was that I wasn't able to access toTicket Fieldsbecause that option doesn't appear. I know there are limitations, but if we want to replicate the same ticket structure, how I can do it?
Can I test out the Zendesk community in the standard sandbox?
Yes, you can create a Guide community page on your Sandbox account.
HiCheeny Aban- is there any way to stop my fellow Admins receiving an email notification whenever I make changes to the Sandbox or create new test tickets etc?
我们得到ting spammed A LOT (and I'm sure they are fed up of my updates!)
HiMatt Farrington-Smith,
Email notifications for ticket updates are controlled by thetriggers.
You can deactivate any triggers that have the action ofEmail user | assigneeorEmail group.
Hello, I'm not seeing the "Sandbox" option in the admin site. Is there something I'm missing?
The Standard Sandbox is available on the Support Enterprise plan (see the graphic at the top of this article) – here's information on upgrading:Viewing and managing plan subscriptions
I am trying to add Sandbox for our company and apparently it won't allow me and getting the below error for some reason.
Tried Clearing Cache
Tried Rebooting my device and internet
Tried different browser but to no success
Anyone that can help please?
That sounds like a potential bug and it looks like you have a ticket open with our Customer Care team to troubleshoot further.
They'll follow up with you shortly to get this all figured out :)
Thank youBrett Bowser. Hope they can identify the issue and implement a fix on this the soonest time.
Hello!
When I'm in our Sandbox and I try to go to Guide, I get the error message that the page doesn't exist and that my account owner needs to enable it.
Our Help Center is live and available for end users.
But the developers we work with need access to the "test environment" for the guide to work on something.
Also, if we create a Sandbox for the guide, is it a separate one or is the same as for Zendesk Support?
Thanks!
Since your Sandbox is considered its own separate account, you'd still need to activate Guide there before anyone can have access to it. So if you're the Sandbox account owner you'd need to navigate to theGuide>Guide Admin>Settingsand activate it from there. Otherwise you'll need to contact the Account Owner of the Sandbox account and have them activate it for you.
Let me know if this doesn't make sense or if you have any other questions!
Hi,
How can I send emails to and from the sandbox to test templates, signatures, triggers, etc?
Rich Andersen- go to admin centre>channels>email then you will be able to see your Sandbox test email address.
ThanksJahn Bronilla, I was able to send a test emails TO my sandbox but I'm not receiving emails FROM my sandbox. Any idea why?
Do you already set up a view to see those new tickets?
You can also search for the name of the sender in Sandbox to see the ticket manually
I have been trying to create a sandbox in order to test somethings regarding Zendesk sell:
All seems to be working fine until I try to access the sell athttps://app.futuresimple.com/dashboards.main
This triggers a redirection tohttps://app.futuresimple.com/payments/reactivation我不能够做任何事情。
If I follow the link to reactivate I end up in subscriptions where it tells me that all seems to be fine for my sandbox:
Any idea of what I could do to be able to actually get to use my Zendesk Sell in this sandbox?
Hello! Is there a way to export your work from Sandbox to, for example, a .csv file?
I' m asking because I'm setting the new bots using the flow builder and it would be nice to share it with my colleagues without providing them with my login data.
Thanks!
You'll need tocontact us directlyso we can check if we can sync it on your account or if there's an underlying cause on this behavior.
Hi Federica,
As of the moment, there's no option to export it or share it on other accounts.
I am a ZD admin and another team at our company wants access to the ZD sandbox to test out a new feature that will generate ZD tickets - is it possible to provide sandbox access to someone else who isn't an admin? Can't seem to find any instructions for this.
Hi,
How do I preview changes made in the sandbox?
I've made a change and want to see how it looks in the Help Centre to see if it's working properly.
Rich Andersen- might want to check out this article on how to preview help centre.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408845893274-Previewing-your-help-center-theme
Damara Allen——几乎相同的过程如何规定access in Live Environment. Only difference is you need to edit their email address as it will be probably the default (sample) email address in Sandbox.
Pleasesign into leave a comment.