Are Sandboxes important when working with Gainsight?

I did not keep up sandbox...and now when my team is maturing and wants new features, I find it VERY hard to showcase them as the two environments are so different. Now that there are both SFDC Change sets and the Gainsight Migration tool, I hope to get Sandbox up to date and then only migrate changes. But it is very hard to keep them in synch in my experience.

Hi @Brittinie N Harper, At Vision Critical, we have two sandboxes(Full and Partial sandbox) and one production environment.

Firstly, we make the changes in the *Full sandbox*, where the QA team tests the changes. Then the configuration changes are done in the *Partial sandbox* - UAT is done here.

Finally, the changes are done in Production.

Although, this approach works well in Salesforce but in Gainsight it is challenging because you don't have the luxury of moving change sets as easily as the migration tool in Gainsight is not really easy to use and is not full proof. Migration tool is glitchy and Gainsight doesn't recommend it.

Although, I strongly believe having configuration in the sandbox is the best approach. It's always advisable to make changes in a sandbox than making them directly in Production.

Pros - Risk mitigation, Back up environment, separate environment to build and test.

Cons - Changes need to be done manually in each environment.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Jivesh

We were advised by our rep that using the sandbox is recommended mostly just for enterprise customers. We are a midsized start up and although I would prefer to use a sandbox, we don't have the bandwidth at the moment to maintain that as well as our production environment, given how difficult the sandbox is to use. Given that we decided against it for now.

We've begun implementing our Sandbox after phase 1 production deployment 🙂 While there are some "challenges" at the moment with parity between the two, it is useful enough to test a lot of functionality as well as reporting. After the recent training this past week, I did learn of some new functionality in Beta that would allow a Full Copy from one environment to another. I am eagerly awaiting that so we can "true-up" and then shift all feature/development work to our Sandbox. I hope that helps! Would be happy to speak privately if the need arises.

We've begun implementing our Sandbox after phase 1 production deployment 🙂 While there are some "challenges" at the moment with parity between the two, it is useful enough to test a lot of functionality as well as reporting. After the recent training this past week, I did learn of some new functionality in Beta that would allow a Full Copy from one environment to another. I am eagerly awaiting that so we can "true-up" and then shift all feature/development work to our Sandbox. I hope that helps! Would be happy to speak privately if the need arises.

We use sandboxes with our clients. They do serve a great purpose for enterprise environments or any company who wants to do full testing cycle before deploying to a production environment. As described in some of the other comments, it is really useful for testing new configurations or enabling new features and testing before you make the changes in Production. But that being said, you can use the migration tool for some of your configs but many others will need to be manually copied over (ie, you have to redo each config in production manually).

One of the best use cases I find for GS is for testing rule changes in a full sandbox. You do need a full sandbox though so that you have . For examples, if you build your health scores in a full sandbox, you can test changes to the scorecard before deploying to production. This incredibly helpful if you are trying to test different scenarios with your scoring algorithms. We test lots of data changes in sandboxes and our clients are able to fully vet all changes before we deploy.

Any updated coments on sandboxes now?

Thank you all your imput is appreciated. We decided to proceed without a Sandbox. We do not have a complex set up and we do not have many users. Not to mention the thought of maintance for both seemed tedious. We will move forward with this and if we find that a sandbox is needed we will revisit.