Preview Spaces (Database to Preview)
Create or Refresh a Preview Space
Preview Spaces in OPS-COM provide clients and support staff with a secure, isolated testing environment that mirrors your live production system's data. These spaces are invaluable for testing new features, staging changes, or conducting training without impacting your operational system, ensuring a safe sandbox for development and learning.
Setup & Configuration
Preview spaces are typically created on demand. Your production/live OPS-COM system is used to either create a new preview space or refresh an existing one with current or historical data.
Creating or Refreshing a Preview Space
- Click Tools, then Database to Preview.
From this page, you have two options for refreshing your preview database:
- For Up-to-Date Information:
- Select Backup Production Database.
- Wait for the backup process to complete.
- Click the Refresh Preview Database button.
- For an Older Backup:
- Select the specific date of the backup you wish to restore the preview database to.
- Click the Refresh Preview Database button.
It may take a few minutes to refresh the database. Generally, a database is refreshed in 1-2 minutes, but it can take up to 15 minutes depending on the size of your database. A message will be displayed along the top of the screen notifying you when the database refresh is complete.
Once the preview database has been refreshed, your preview system will automatically be created or updated. You can access the preview system by adding ".preview" before ops-com.com in your browser's address bar. For example, if your production space is https://tomahawku.ops-com.com, your preview space will be https://tomahawku.preview.ops-com.com.
Using this Feature
Accessing Your Preview Space
As an OPS-COM client, you can access your preview space directly by simply adding the ".preview." suffix to your subdomain name. For instance, if your production site is located at https://yourorganization.ops-com.com, your preview space can be found at https://yourorganization.preview.ops-com.com.
Preview Space Banner
To clearly distinguish a preview space from a live production system, all preview spaces are denoted with an orange warning banner displayed prominently at the top of the page.
Locking and Unlocking Database Reset Option
You can now lock and unlock preview and development OPS-COM databases to prevent them from being reset or refreshed accidentally.
- Go to the Reset Database page.
- Toggle the lock/unlock setting as needed.
- You will be prompted to provide a reason for locking or unlocking the database.
- A history of the previous 10 lock/unlock actions will be displayed below for your reference.
This feature allows you to ensure that if you are actively working on a preview/development system and do NOT wish for your changes to be reset or lost, you can place a lock. This lock notifies others attempting to refresh the database that a reset is not desired.
Best Practices & Considerations
- Testing and Training Benefits: Preview spaces are extremely useful for testing and training purposes. They allow you to work with a copy of your live database, providing real data for exercises without any risk of affecting your production system. The database can be manually reset at any time, allowing you to "erase" training data and start testing scenarios from scratch.
- Daily Data Backups: Production/live data is backed up daily at 2 AM EST and is available to push to the testing environment at any time. This means if you perform a refresh of your preview site, it will pull data captured the night before. This operation is specifically for providing relevant data for testing and preview during training or similar efforts and is separate from normal system backup procedures.
- Automatic Deletion of Inactive Spaces: Preview sites are automatically deleted after 7 days of no login activity.
- If you require a preview site for an extended period, please contact OPS-COM support staff, and an expiry date can be set.
- Email Notifications are Suppressed: No Emails Sent from Preview/Testing - All email notifications that would normally be sent from the server are captured and suppressed in preview/testing environments. Therefore, any email notifications generated within your preview space will not reach clients or external recipients. This is a deliberate security measure to prevent accidental communication from a non-production environment.