Skip to main content

Getting started with Zuora Central Sandbox

Zuora

Getting started with Zuora Central Sandbox

Zuora Central Sandbox combines the capability to copy production data along with production-like performance into a single test environment tenant.  While Zuora Central Sandbox always comes with a snapshot of scrubbed production data, it can also be utilized for a brand new implementation in case the production tenant has no data at that time. The use cases of Zuora Central Sandbox include all that of API Sandbox and more. See the following use cases supported by Zuora Central Sandbox.

  • Basic implementation configuration and integration

  • Training

  • Integration testing

  • Regression testing

  • Performance testing (with guidelines)

  • Pre-production testing

  • User acceptance testing 

Zuora Central Sandbox is hosted on a production-like AWS infrastructure, allowing you to test the API response time, the bill runs and payment runs with production-level data loading. It provides a more realistic view of performance than API Sandbox. While the Zuora Central Sandbox is designed for production-level performance, Zuora recommends you to contact Zuora Global Support if you plan to test over a certain amount of volume in a 24 hour period in the Zuora Central Sandbox. See Performance guidelines for the details.

Zuora Central Sandbox vs API Sandbox

See the contrasts between the use cases of API Sandbox and Zuora Central Sandbox.

  API Sandbox Zuora Central Sandbox
Regression testing Yes Yes
Performance testing (with guidelines) No Yes
Pre-production testing Yes Yes
User acceptance testing  No Yes
Basic implementation configuration and integration Yes Yes
Training Yes Yes
Integration testing Yes Yes

Guidelines on Zuora Central Sandbox environments

General Implementation Guidelines 

All data in your central sandbox will be deleted during the refresh process, and your sandbox will be unavailable until the refresh is complete.

See the following general guidelines when working with Zuora Central Sandbox:

  • Limit testing to end-to-end feature testing and start with smaller data sets.

  • Follow the performance guideline. Contact Zuora Global Support if you plan on any activity that exceeds the guidelines in a 24 hour period.

  • Reduce or turn off notifications and callouts. 

Data copy guidelines

You can request for a data copy once every 28 days through the following ways:

  • Request through the Zuora Central Sandbox homepage
  • Submit a request at Zuora Global Support. You must provide the endpoint of your environment when submitting the request.

It takes up to 7 business days to complete the data copy of your environment.

Zuora recommends that you plan ahead for your testing and data copy request. While the data copy for most tenants can be completed in less than 3 business days, it can take a longer time to complete the data copy for large tenants.

Concurrent request limits

Zuora system's concurrent request limits are applicable to all sandboxes and production environments.

Data limitations

The data limitations of every Zuora application or service in the production environment are also applicable to the Zuora Central Sandbox environment. 

Access Zuora Central Sandbox environments

You can access Zuora Central Sandbox environments through the Zuora UI and API. See the base URLs for the application and API.

Username and password

The naming convention of your Zuora Central Sandbox login username is:

<username>_<tenant id>

where <username> is your username of Zuora production environment and the <tenant id> is your Zuora Central Sandbox tenant Id that is sent to you when your Zuora Central Sandbox environment is provisioned. For example, john.doe@zuora.com_10000001.

The tenant id is appended in the username to help identify which Zuora Central Sandbox tenant you are logging into.

Your login password of the Zuora Central Sandbox environment is the same as that of the corresponding production environment.

Initial setup

Make the following configurations upon the first-time login:

  • Refer to Zuora Testing Environments to confirm key attributes that are scrubbed as part of the copy process.

  • Re-configure the integration with external applications (for example, Salesforce, Avalara, Payment Gateways, and so on) as credentials for the external applications are scrubbed for security purposes when your Zuora Central Sandbox environment is provisioned.

  • If you have a Salesforce integration, Zuora 360 in Salesforce must be updated with a new Entity Key and Id representing the new Zuora Central Sandbox tenant.

  • Reconfigure all required certificates as certificates will be scrubbed. 

  • Reconfigure your APIs, callouts, and schedules in Workflow, as Workflow endpoints and credentials may change.

  • Reconfigure your callouts within Workflow, as callout data may be scrubbed.

  • Central Sandbox refresh will not copy the scheduled Bill Run and Payment Run, so the Bill Run and Payment Run will not work as scheduled after the refresh.

  • Central Sandbox refresh will not copy the OAuth 2.0 providers. You can create and manage OAuth 2.0 providers independently across Production and Central Sandbox environments.

  • Ensure any additional information within Workflows such as callout endpoints, credentials, and liquid templates are updated as needed.

  • Add new users to Commerce Portal. Note that your users from production will not be inherited to Central Sandbox automatically.

  • Reconfigure tokens that relate Commerce Portal to other apps (for example, Customer Catalog).  Tokens from each source app will be re-generated and must be obtained from that app within the Central Sandbox environment.

  • Within the Collections application, tokens that relate various applications (for example, Workflow, Payment Plans, Notes) must be re-configured.

Other characteristics

Once the Zuora Central Sandbox is provisioned or when the production data is copied, a full set of the latest production data will be in the Zuora Central Sandbox environment. See the following characteristics of Zuora Central Sandbox environment:

  • Zuora Central Sandbox uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as the system time.

  • The snapshot of the production data is complete up to 1 day prior to the data copy request.  Any data created after the request may not appear in the Zuora Central Sandbox upon data copy completion. The data copy job begins within 24 hours after you submit the request. This turnaround time will be shorter if you use the Self-Service Refresh feature to refresh data. For example, if you start a refresh of your Central Sandbox on Dec 15th, the complete data up to Dec 14th will be available in your Central Sandbox after the refresh.

    Note: The system automatically determines the more effective method between Production snapshot and Instant refresh by analyzing tenant data. Therefore, you will receive more up-to-date data with a shorter turnaround time for your refresh.

  • While most production copy processes take 2 - 3 days, your process may take longer if you have a large amount of data. Contact Zuora Global Support if you have questions regarding the data copy process.

  • The OAuth credentials and IP address enforcement must be reconfigured as this information is scrubbed for security.

    • SSO SAML Enabled users in production will be disabled in CSBX the first time they are copied to CSBX. However, once the users are reconfigured with SSO in CSBX, the subsequent refresh will save their SSO configuration for future refreshes.

    • Any new SSO SAML Enabled users in production must be reconfigured after being copied to CSBX for the first time, and the configuration is preserved the next time the tenant is refreshed. 
      See Configure Zuora users for single sign-on to enable SSO SAML.

  • Your customers will not receive notifications from Zuora Central Sandbox as the customers' email addresses are intentionally scrubbed for a test environment.

  • The integration with Salesforce, payment gateways, tax engines, and other external services must be re-configured as the credentials for the external services are scrubbed for security.

  • After a refresh or data copy of Zuora Central Sandbox, the SMTP server settings will be reset. Tenants that use Advanced SMTP or External SMTP will be reset to use the default Zuora mail server after the refresh or data copy. All email related features will work after the reset. However, if you want to use Advanced SMTP or an External SMTP, you will need to reconfigure the SMTP server settings after the refresh or data copy.

  • Refresh will erase all the data in the sandbox and bring over the latest copy from production.

  • The values of external keys, Id, or time-stamps in the Zuora Central Sandbox might change from that of the production environment. See the following table for details. Submit a request at Zuora Global Support to check the value changes of keys or Ids that are not listed in the table.

    Table Field Expected Behavior
    All CreatedBy User Id will change in every tenant
    All CreatedDate Persist
    All UpdatedBy User Id will change in every tenant
    All UpdatedDate Persist
    Entity Key Entity number will change for every distinct tenant
    Entity Id Entity Id will change for every distinct tenant
    Account Number Persist
    Account Id Persist
    Product SKU Persist
    Product Id Persist
    ProductRatePlan Id Persist
    ProductRatePlanCharge Id Persist
    Invoice Number Persist
    Invoice Id Persist
    InvoiceItem Id Persist
    InvoiceItemAdjustment Number Persist
    InvoiceItemAdjustment Id Persist
    Payment Number Persist
    Payment Id Persist
    Refund Number Persist
    Refund Id Persist
    Subscription Id Persist
    BillRun Id Persist
    RatePlan Id Persist
    RatePlanCharge Id Persist

Support for Zuora Marketplace Applications

Zuora Central Sandbox supports the availability and data copy of many features to help you achieve your testing and deployment needs. In addition to the supported Zuora features, Zuora Central Sandbox supports Workflow, Collections, and other Marketplace applications in different levels in terms of feature availability and data copy.

Feature Availability

Feature availability is defined as whether features can be used to create new configurations and data.  For example, if you have Workflow entitled, you can use Zuora Central Sandbox to create and test new Workflows against your production data.  If you have Collections entitled, you can create new Collections configurations and test how it works with your production data.

Data Copy

Data copy is defined as taking a snapshot of your production data, with personally identifiable information (PII or P2I) and sensitive data scrubbed. This means that in addition to being able to test new configurations and new data with the features, you can copy data or configurations from production to the Zuora Central Sandbox, make updates, and test the impact of those changes.

The data copy process consists of four steps including data export from production, data scrub, target tenant reset, and final data import to Central Sandbox. Once the target tenant is reset, it becomes inaccessible until the import is complete. Since activities do not stop on production during the data copy process, Zuora utilizes an additional step to reconcile any data changes to minimize inconsistencies and bring in the most accurate data to mirror the Production environment.

Data copy is supported for your core Zuora production data, such as your Product Catalog, Accounts, Subscriptions, other transactional data, Custom Objects, and Settings.

Feature

Feature Availability

Data Copy

Zuora Billing features

Available

Available

Workflow

Available

Available

Collections

Available

Available

Advanced Payment Manager

Available

Available

Promotion Codes

Available

Available

Commerce Portal

Available

Available

Lockbox

Available

Available

Tax Connectors

Available

Available

Developer Tools

Available

No copy required

Reporting

Available

Available

Analytics Dashboard Configurations

Available

Available

Appstore Connector

Available

 

Direct Debit Manager

Available

 

Flexera Connector

Not supported

 

GL Connector

Available

Available

Invoice Numbering V2

Not supported

 

Number Translator

Not supported

 

Prepaid Drawdown

Available

 

Tax

Available

Available

Tokenized Payment Gateway

Available

 

Zuora Connector for NetSuite UI

Available

 

connect.zuora.com + zuora/connect libraries

Available

 

Customer Catalog

Available

 

Ecommerce Subscriber Portal

Available

Available

Ecommerce Shopping Portal

Available

Available

Configurable Payment Retry

Available

Available

Collections Window

Available

Available

Disputes

Available

Available

Notes

Available

Available

Payment Plans

Available

Available

Statement Generator

Available

Available

Minimum Commit

Not supported

 

Webhook Receiver

Available

 

All other marketplace applications and connectors

Check with Global Support

Check with Global Support

Limitations

Zuora Central Sandbox has the following limitations:

  • Zuora Central Sandbox supports copying multiple entities from your production environment.  However, it has the following limitations:
    • Central Sandbox does not support swapping the parent and child entity hierarchy structure. The swapping of the entity hierarchy in a Production environment will not be reflected in the Central Sandbox.
    • We only support the refresh at the global level. Refreshing just a single child entity is not supported.
  • It is not allowed to create or provision a standalone Central Sandbox tenant. All Central Sandbox tenants must be copied or refreshed from a production environment.
  • To avoid compliance issues, Zuora Central Sandbox does not support downloading finance reports and invoice PDFs generated from your production environment. Once data is copied over from production to Central Sandbox, the data is scrubbed and is considered as testing data. You can still perform common activities like reopen accounting periods and re-run trial balance, which will generate finance reports based on the latest testing data. The original reports or invoice PDFs can be downloaded only from your production environment.
  • The refresh from Production to Central Sandbox is limited to every 28 days.
  • Currently, Central Sandbox only allows the copy of the entire production data and does not allow the copy of a subset of data.
  • When copied from Production to CSBX, PII data stored within custom objects or custom fields are not automatically scrubbed and must be removed by the user.
  • Zuora Central Sandbox copies only usage data from the previous year. Contact Zuora Global Support if you require more than one year of usage data. Depending on your tenants' usage volume, requests for more than a year may increase refresh time.