Has anyone had success utilizing the Sandbox Management utility?
We had issues after our last SFDC sandbox refresh that required 2-3 weeks of time to correct. Unfortunately it happened right in the middle of heavy development and deployment of scorecard 2.0 and multiple Rules Engine configurations. We want to sync our Gainsight prod to our Gainsight sandbox get things caught up so we can go back to the best-practices of development using Sandbox with pushes to production.
For the record - I am not a fan of doing troubleshooting or backwards development in a sandbox! Seems like a waste of effort.
When we attempt to refresh the sandbox the prompt asks for SFDC Org ID - which errors with “Invalid Parameters Message: New org id is already present” when I input our existing SFDC Org ID.
-Documentation does not indicate that you cannot perform a MDA Tenant Refresh on an existing sandbox.
-Sandbox Name in the Sandbox Management UI is hyperlinked — to nothing. Why?
What is your experience using the Sandbox Management section?
I’ve done SFDC Sandbox refreshes within both Gainsight Nxt and SFDC versions. The challenge with Gainsight is it doesn’t recognize the new SFDC Sandbox.
What happens in the background when you refresh a SFDC Sanbox is SFDC removes the old instance and creates a brand new instance that matches your Prod instance. If you check the SFDC Org ID for the original sandbox and the new one, you’ll notice they are different. I found this post before in a SFDC forum that helps to explain this but I don’t think this information is listed in their support community:
https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/231425/what-exactly-does-refreshing-sandbox-do
With Gainsight SFDC, there are a lot of configurations that are not copied over from Production. Which is why you need to spend 2-3 weeks migrating Prod config back to the new GS SFDC Sandbox. You also need to notify GS Support to point the MDA to the new SFDC sandbox instance. This can be a pretty costly endeavour.
With Gainsight Nxt, it’s a little less painful because GS and SFDC are separate apps. And you can refresh your SFDC sandbox without changing your GS sandbox. All you need to do is reconnect the GS to SFDC. It takes a bit of time but not nearly as much time as rebuilding your GS SFDC sandbox.
What I have found works best with Gainsight SFDC sandboxes is if you maintain a completely separate SFDC sandbox that is just for managing GS. If you are trying to code in the same sandbox or build SFDC configurations, it can become fairly challenging to manage. And ideally, you don’t have to refresh that org. It’s not ideal but it makes it a bit easier to manage.
Hope this insights help you on your quest. Many large enterprises have to manage releases and fully test in sandboxes before they can migrated changes to Production. This is become more and more a standard as enterprises start to manage GS as a proper business application supported by IT.
Hi@davebrown2242
Sorry for the issues you faced with Sandbox refresh utility
Currently, one SFDC org can be linked to one GS tenant. On Gainsight Sandbox refresh, the initial understanding was that the Salesforce sandbox will also be refreshed creating a new org id.
We have identified this issue and will allow for existing Salesforce org to be used on Gainsight Sandbox refresh. This fix is planned for the Dec release.
The name is currently a hyperlink, but the link option is only possible for NXT. I see how this is confusing and will see if we can improve the experience.
Are there any other issues you faced with the utility? Do let me know, I work towards improving your experience.
Thank you for your time
Preethi
Hi@jean.nairon
Thank you for your inputs.
I had one question
Ideally, we copy everything from the Production instance to the refreshed sandbox. I could check for the configurations that you noticed that are not copied over and I will have a look at it.
Currently, we only reject the schedules on Sandbox refreshes. Otherwise, we do a full copy.
Thank you once again for your time
Preethi