Preview Spaces
Preview spaces exist to allow clients to test or stage changes to their system. The preview spaces are secured in the same manner as our production/live systems though they exist in a testing environment.
Preview sites are automatically deleted after 7 days of no login activity. Please contact OPS-COM support staff if you require a preview site for an extended period of time, an expiry date can be set.
Production/live data is backed up daily at 2 AM EST and available to push to the testing environment at any time. In other words a capture of the database is made 2 AM EST daily so if you were to do a refresh of the preview site the following day it would pull data captured the night before. This operation is outside of normal backup procedures and exists only for the purpose of having relevant data available for testing and preview during training or similar efforts.
As a client of OPS-COM you can access your preview space by simply adding the ".preview." suffix to your subdomain name. So as an example, TomahawkU's production space is found at the web address https://tomahawku.ops-com.com and the preview space is found at https://tomahawku.preview.ops-com.com
Preview Space Banner
Preview Spaces are denoted with an orange warning banner as seen below in the screenshot.
Considerations for Testing
he Preview spaces are very useful for testing and training. They allow you work with a copy of the live database so that you will have real data to work with without affecting your production system. The database can be manually reset at any time by following the instructions below for "Reset the Database". This will allow you to "erase" your training data and start testing again.
Emails are not Sent on Preview/Testing
All email that would be sent from the server is captured before it goes into the "wild". Therefore, any preview/testing email notifications will not reach clients.
Create a Preview Space
Normally preview spaces are created on demand by clients or OPS-COM support staff when required.
To do this, login to your production/live OPS-COM system, then go to Tools → Reset Database:
Next select the date of the backup you wish to restore the preview database to and click the "Refresh Preview Database" button:
Please note it may take a few minutes to refresh the database. Generally a database is refreshed in 1 - 2 minutes, but can take up to 15 minutes depending on the size of your database. A message will be displayed along the top notifying you when the database is done refreshing.
Once the preview database has been refreshed your preview system will automatically be created. You can access the preview system by adding ".preview" before ops-com.com. Example: https://tomahawku.preview.ops-com.com
Refresh Preview Database
To refresh the preview database with more up to date data (a more recent backup), login to your preview system and select Tools → Reset Database:
Next select the date of the backup you wish to restore the preview database to and click the "Refresh Preview Database" button:
Please note it may take a few minutes to refresh the database. Generally a database is refreshed in 1 - 2 minutes, but can take up to 15 minutes depending on the size of your database. A message will be displayed along the top notifying you when the database is done refreshing.
Lock and Unlock Database Reset Option
You can now lock and unlock preview and development OPS-COM databases from being reset/refreshed.
To do this, go to the Reset Database page and lock/unlock the database as needed. A reason will be given for locking and unlocking databases and a history of the previous 10 locks/unlocks will be shown below for reference.
This feature allows you to ensure that if you're working on a preview/development system and do NOT wish for your changes to be reset/lost, you can place a lock notifying others who try and refresh the database that you do not want this done. Until we each have our own OPS-COM accounts, please include your name in the lock/unlock reason so that others know who to go to when unlocking the database.
Please see the following image for further reference on the Lock and Unlock Reset Database functionality.
