What are best practices for managing marketplace apps with Sandbox refresh?

[Tracy Stimac]

If your company has many marketplace applications installed, what are some of the best practices and procedures you have put in place to manage the application configurations when refreshing the sandbox production data?  How have you minimized resetting all the marketplace applications with each refresh?

[Marc - Devoteam · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tracy Stimac 

What is the exact information you are seeking as 3rd party apps and related app data is not copied on a sandbox refresh?

See documentation on what is copied to the sandbox.

what-data-is-copied-to-sandboxes 

[Tracy Stimac]

Yes, we know it is not copied as we've recently added our first marketplace app.  We've had to build some procedures (currently manual) to reload the marketplace app and any configurations/data needs as we use the sandbox as a Dev/QA environment.  We were told that many clients have up to 20 marketplace apps and since a refresh doesn't copy them we have to reload with each refresh.  Also, what frequency of refresh do teams typically follow?

[Marc - Devoteam]

Depends on your frequency of change and UAT development you do in the Sandbox

We normally do it once every 6 months, but this is based on the instance size we have as we need 5 days to configure the sandbox to be usable again after a refresh.

In my opinion it all depends on the size of your instance and the amount of change that is applied and the effort that you need put in to have the sandbox working after the refresh.

[Tracy Stimac]

Thanks Mark!  This is the type of information I was looking for, seeing that it takes 5 days to configure the sandbox for your instance is insightful.  With only one app, we can prep for the refresh and reconfigure within 1-2 days today, but we were envisioning that expanding with more apps.  Problem we are envisioning is that we are still building out and changing standards as we drive enterprise usage and often need the refreshed production data to then prove out use of a new application/configuration.  This is driving up the refresh frequency.  We had been refreshing monthly but see that changing due to the Sandbox rebuild effort.