This document provides steps on how to perform various operations related to sandboxes in the Adobe Experience Platform user interface.
View sandboxes
In the Platform UI, select Sandboxes in the left navigation and then select Browse to open the Sandboxes dashboard. The dashboard lists all available sandboxes for your organization, including their respective types (production or development).
Switch between sandboxes
The sandbox indicator is located in the top header of the Platform UI and displays the title of the sandbox that you are currently in, its region, and its type.
To switch between sandboxes, select the sandbox indicator and select the desired sandbox from the dropdown list.
Once a sandbox is selected, the screen refreshes and updates to the sandbox you selected.
Create a new sandbox create
NOTE
When a new sandbox is created, you must first add that new sandbox to your product profile in Adobe Admin Console before you can start using the new sandbox. See the documentation on managing permissions for a product profile for information on how to provision a sandbox to a product profile.
Use the following video for a quick overview on how to use Sandboxes in Experience Platform.
In this video, we’re going to talk about sandboxes in Adobe Experience platform. A sandbox is a virtual partition of a platform instance. Using sandboxes, you can develop, test, and experiment with platform features without affecting your production environment and run multiple platform-enabled applications in parallel.
When you create resources, ingest data, and perform other data operations in platform, all of the activity is contained within a sandbox. When you create additional sandboxes, you are essentially creating different separate versions of your platform instance. Each sandbox maintains its own resources, including schemas, datasets, profiles, and more, and actions taken in one sandbox do not affect any other sandboxes. Outside of experience platform support for sandboxes varies across the experience cloud ecosystem, such as in Adobe Target or Adobe Audience Manager. For details on how each product support sandboxes, please refer to the documentation. There are two types of sandboxes in platform, production sandboxes and development sandboxes. A production sandbox is meant to be used with profiles in your production environment. When you purchase platform, you have one production sandbox, which is a default sandbox for your organization. If needed, you can create additional production sandboxes dedicated to distinct lines of business, brands, projects, or regions. However, only one of these production sandboxes can be set as the default. Unlike other sandboxes, the default production sandbox cannot be deleted or reset. When integrating with platform, certain applications like Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager are only able to work with the default production sandbox. By contrast, development sandboxes are used exclusively for development and testing with non production profiles. Your development sandboxes can collectively use up to 10% of your license profile commitment. A default experience platform license grants you a total of five sandboxes. Each of these sandboxes can be classified as production or development depending on your business needs. If required, you can also license additional packs of sandboxes. For more information on sandbox licensing, please refer to the documentation.
Access to sandboxes must be granted by an administrator through Adobe admin console. Within the permissions tab of a platform product profile, administrators can control access to individual sandboxes in the same way as permissions to platform features and capabilities. See the video on how to control access to platform using admin console for more information. In the platform UI, the sandbox ribbon shows which sandbox you are currently working in, including whether it’s production or development. Using the sandbox switcher, we can quickly switch the experience between any sandbox that we’ve been granted access to through Adobe admin console. In our case, a production sandbox and a development sandbox. Note that in production, there are a number of schemes and datasets already defined and in use. Switching to the development sandbox, these are gone, providing a clean slate for us to begin experimenting and testing. Also, notice that in the development sandbox, some of the features in the left rail are unavailable. This is because there’ve not been permission to our user for this sandbox in Adobe admin console. Let’s say that we’re running some experiments in our development sandbox. After we’ve ingested data and attempted to run a query on the resulting data set, we realized that some key fields are missing and we need to try again. We could just upload a new dataset in this case, but since we’re working in a development sandbox, we have the option to reset the entire sandbox instead. This allows us to start from a clean slate and not have to worry about getting confused by the old, incomplete dataset. If we’ve been granted sandbox reset permissions through admin console, we can go to sandboxes in the left nav and select the sandbox we want to reset from the list. After selecting sandbox reset, we’re warned that this will delete all user-created resources in the sandbox and that this cannot be undone. We’ll confirm our choice by entering the sandbox name. And after hitting Reset, our sandbox is returned to the original pristine state. We can now continue running experiments on our data and operations. And ultimately, with confidence, we can switch to production and load any changes we may have proved out in the development environment. Keep in mind that the default production sandbox cannot be reset if the identity graph hosted within it is also being used by Adobe Analytics for the cross-device analytics feature, or if the identity graph hosted within it is also being used by Adobe Audience Manager for the people based destinations feature. If we have sandbox administration permissions for platform, we can also use the Sandboxes tab to edit the basic details for the sandbox. If a sandbox is not currently acting as our default production sandbox and we otherwise don’t need it, we can also delete it from here.
Finally, let’s take a quick look at how sandboxes work in platform APIs. In platform API calls, the x-sandbox-name request header is used to indicate which sandbox and operation will take place in. Here in Postman, let’s make a call to the catalog API to list all data sets. Providing the name for our development sandbox and our API call, we can see that this only returns a single test dataset that we uploaded to the development sandbox earlier. If we switch the sandbox name to prod and make the call again, we can see all of our production data sets.
You should now have a better understanding of how to leverage sandboxes to use, explore, and experiment with platform features without the risk of adversely affecting your production environment. For more information on managing sandboxes in platform, please refer to the documentation. Thanks for watching. -
To create a new sandbox, select Create sandbox on the top-right corner of the screen.
The Create sandbox dialog box appears. If you are creating a development sandbox, select Development in the dropdown panel. To create a new production sandbox, select Production.
After selecting the type, provide your sandbox with a name and a title. The title is meant to be human-readable and should be descriptive enough to be easily identifiable. The sandbox name is an all-lowercase identifier for use in API calls and should therefore be unique and concise. The sandbox name must begin with a letter, have a maximum of 256 characters, and consist only of alphanumeric characters and hyphens (-).
When finished, select Create.
Once you have finished creating the sandbox, refresh the page and the new sandbox appears in the Sandboxes dashboard with a status of “Creating”. New sandboxes take approximately 30 seconds to be provisioned by the system, after which their status changes to “Active”.
Reset a sandbox
WARNING
The following is a list of exceptions that can prevent you from resetting the default production sandbox or a user-created production sandbox:
The default production sandbox cannot be reset if the identity graph hosted in the sandbox is also being used by Adobe Analytics for the Cross Device Analytics (CDA) feature.
The default production sandbox cannot be reset if the identity graph hosted in the sandbox is also being used by Adobe Audience Manager for the People Based Destinations (PBD).
The default production sandbox cannot be reset if it contains data for both CDA and PBD features.
A user-created production sandbox that is used for bi-directional segment sharing with Adobe Audience Manager or Audience Core Service can be reset after a warning message.
Before initiating a sandbox reset, you will be required to delete your compositions manually to ensure that the associated audience data is cleaned up properly.
Delete audience compositions
Audience composition is currently not integrated with the sandbox reset capability, so audiences will need to be deleted manually prior to performing the sandbox reset.
Select Audiences from the left navigation and then select Compositions.
Next, select the ellipsis (...) next to the first audience, then select Delete.
A confirmation of successful deletion is displayed and you are returned to the Compositions tab.
Repeat the above steps with all your compositions. This will delete all audiences from the audience inventory. Once all audiences have been removed, you can continue to reset the sandbox.
Resetting a sandbox
Resetting a production or development sandbox deletes all resources associated with that sandbox (schemas, datasets, and so on), while maintaining the sandbox’s name and associated permissions. This “clean” sandbox continues to be available under the same name for users that have access to it.
Select the sandbox you want to reset from the list of sandboxes. In the right-navigation panel that appears, select Sandbox reset.
A dialog box appears prompting you to confirm your choice. Select Continue to proceed.
In the final confirmation window, enter the name of the sandbox in the dialog box and select Reset.
Delete a sandbox
WARNING
You cannot delete the default production sandbox. However, any user-created production sandbox that is used for bi-directional segment sharing with Audience Manager or Audience Core Service can be deleted after a warning message.
Deleting a production or development sandbox permanently removes all resources associated with that sandbox, including permissions.
Select the sandbox you want to delete from the list of sandboxes. In the right-navigation panel that appears, select Delete.
A dialog box appears prompting you to confirm your choice. Select Continue to proceed.
In the final confirmation window, enter the name of the sandbox in the dialog box and select Continue.
Next steps
This document demonstrated how to manage sandboxes within the Experience Platform UI. For information on how to manage sandboxes using the Sandbox API, see the sandbox developer guide.
