As an admin, making changes to automation rules and configurations in your production account can be tricky. However, you don’t want to be restricted from trying out new ways or improve existing configurations set up in your service desk. This is why we’re bringing Sandbox to Freshservice.
With Sandbox, you can create an out-of-the-box environment to test out workflows and configurations before syncing them to your Freshservice account (a.k.a your production account) while keeping away from ramifications. Though Sandbox is a mirror of your Freshservice account, tickets, customer data or contact will not be copied.
The following modules will be copied to your Sandbox account:
Business Hours
Departments & department fields
Requesters - (Reporting managers/Department head/Approvers/members of the CAB)
Requester Fields
Roles & Permissions
Agents
Groups
CAB
Locations
Form Fields(Tickets/Problems/Changes/Releases)
Service Catalog
SLA policies
Workflow Automator(All Modules)
Change lifecycle
Navigate to Admin -> Sandbox in Service Desk Productivity.
In the Sandbox Details tab, click on Create Sandbox and once the Sandbox account is created, admins will be notified via email. This will take some time based on your service desk configuration.
Click on Open Sandbox to log in to your Sandbox account in a new tab. Here, you can test out configurations before syncing them your Freshservice account.
Sandbox is available only on the Enterprise plan.
Once you test out the configurations in Sandbox, go to your Sandbox account, navigate to Admin -> Sandbox in Service Desk Productivity
Click on View Changes to fetch all the changes made in your Sandbox account.
You can then click on Regenerate Change List -> Regenerate to ensure all the changes created are included in the change list before syncing them.
If there aren’t any conflict or sync errors shown in the change list, you can go ahead and click on Sync Now to have these changes synced to your Freshservice Account.
Once the sync is successful, your sandbox account will automatically get destroyed.
The banner on top of the screen will indicate if you’re in your Sandbox account. Also, the URL of your sandbox account would look like this https://companyname-fs-sandbox.com.
When there are modifications to values, description or properties in both your Freshservice account and your Sandbox account.
For eg: When the group name is changed from the Information Technology team to Capacity Management in your Sandbox account and the same group is changed from the Information Technology team to IT Team in your Freshservice account as well. This will lead to Conflict.
Note: Conflict errors are not applicable for Workflow Automator and Change Lifecycle.
This includes activities such as creation or deletion of new or existing status, transitions, node, event or action in both your Freshservice account and Sandbox account. Sync errors cannot be fixed easily like conflict errors.
For eg: When a transition is added to the status (Pending Review -> Closed) in your Sandbox account and a transition has been added to the same status (Pending Review -> Open) in your Freshservice account as well. This will lead to a Sync Error.
Note: Sync errors can happen only in Workflow Automator and Change Lifecycle.
In case of a conflict, admins can fix the errors, click on Regenerate Change List and then click on Sync Now to have the changes copied to your Freshservice Account.
In case of a sync error, admins will have to clone that workflow/lifecycle in the sandbox account, click on Regenerate Change List and then click Sync Now to have the changes copied to your Freshservice Account.
You can navigate to Admin -> Sandbox -> Sync History tab in your Freshservice account and check the sync history for any particular date.
As admins, you might not always want to sync the changes to your Freshservice account. In that case, you could also directly destroy the Sandbox created by navigating to Admin -> Sandbox -> Destroy Sandbox from your Freshservice account.
Few cases such as deletion of an Agent/ CAB/User/Group/Location/Department/Service item/ Service category are not captured in the change list and will not be synced to your Freshservice account as deleting such key entities would have a huge impact on existing tickets in your Freshservice account.
