We’re excited to officially release Phase 1 of the SolarWinds® Service Desk Sandbox.
Let’s be real—making big changes in production can feel like a high-stakes thriller movie. Whether it’s a workflow tweak, a portal update, or a configuration experiment, the ‘Save’ button shouldn’t give you stage fright. Your sandbox gives you a safe, dedicated space to explore, test, and learn—without ever impacting your live environment.
What the Service Desk Sandbox Is
The sandbox is a developer environment that mirrors your production setup while running as a separate, independent instance. It provides a dedicated space to test configurations, refine workflows, and explore new capabilities before bringing changes live to your users. This is especially useful when preparing for larger updates, onboarding new team members, or experimenting with more advanced configurations.
Why This Matters
Sandbox helps your team move faster without the oops factor. Common use cases include:
- Preparing for updates: Test and validate major changes, such as workflow updates or service portal modifications, before rolling them out to end users
- Onboarding new staff: Give new team members a safe environment to learn, explore, and become familiar with your configuration without impacting production
- Innovating safely: Experiment with routing rules, automation, and service experiences in a mirror environment designed specifically for exploration.
You can explore more sandbox use cases to help tailor the environment to your specific business needs.
Technical Capabilities and Environment Scope
Creation process
You can create your developer sandbox directly from Service Desk by navigating to Setup > Account > Sandbox and triggering the build process. Provisioning can take a couple of hours to complete, so it’s a great time to grab a coffee while the magic happens.
Environment identity
To ensure there’s no confusion between sandbox and production, the environment includes a prominent banner indicating you are in the sandbox and a unique URL in the following format: {{youraccountname}}-sandbox.samanage.com.
The Roadmap for Syncing
This release is Phase 1 of a broader sandbox feature roadmap. As part of this release, any changes you want to keep can be manually applied to your live environment. Looking forward, we plan to expand the sandbox experience to streamline how work moves from testing to production through a sync-back capability. Sandbox development will be guided directly by customer feedback, so don't hesitate to share yours with us.
What’s Under the Hood
To provide a realistic testing environment while maintaining security best practices, the dev sandbox copies core structural data while intentionally excluding sensitive information.
Included in the copy:
- Organization & Sites
- Roles and Permissions
- Users, Groups, and Queues
- Service Portal settings
- Custom Forms
Not carried over by design:
- Single sign-on configuration
- Credentials
- Domain management
- Audit logs
We Want Your Feedback
This is an evolving capability, and we want to build it alongside our favorite people—the THWACK® community. If you’ve started using the Service Desk Sandbox, we’d love to hear from you:
- What use cases are you testing today?
- What would make syncing changes back to production more valuable for you?
- What additional capabilities would make the Sandbox more useful in your day-to-day work?
If you have any questions, please leave a comment below. We love to hear your thoughts!
