Testing/Development Banners for Regulated Industry Accounts

Hello,

Regulated Industry accounts are often deployed according to best practices around having separated sandbox | staging | production accounts, to allow for readily following least-access principles around production data, and protect validated data environments against intrusion from invalidated usage.

This is great! This feature has been very useful for us. However, these environments look almost indistinguishable from each other visually. We include a “DEV” badge for our sandbox so there’s visual evidence, but it doesn’t really standout. As an account owner, this gives me a low-level anxiety that one day due to too-little caffeine I will go in to clean up test content, and accidentally delete production data.

I would really like a way to create some very obvious visual element in the Factory environment, that can be used to inform users whether they are in production, staging, or development. I have no strong preferences, but some good candidates seem like:

  • Allow customization of some colors used in the Tulip cloud UI, to support running dev or staging accounts in different colors.
  • Allow admins to add visual banners to the UI, that can support short text strings like “TESTING” or “DEVELOPMENT”
  • Allow adding an account-level watermark to high criticality elements like tables, apps, machines, or automations, that can display short text like “DEV”, “TESTING”, etc. Bonus points if this appears on app printouts.

Hi David, this is a great idea. Are there any other products you use that do a good job of this? I’d like to look at how they handle this.

@kevin.kononenko Sure. We use Arena, which includes a feature to differentiate workspaces using color. That color then gets associated with the top menu, the primary color for some high-impact buttons like submitting change orders, and the secondary color for lower-impact buttons.

Atlassian’s software also supports some account-level options like banners for admin announcements. I think it also has custom themes, which would fit the use case, but is more of a look-and-feel feature than error-proofing.

I’ve thought of this as well. Our internal software development instances have a different color banner/task bar at the top than the production instance. So maybe a chooseable default banner color for the Tulip Menu bar?

Love these ideas. We will discuss as a team. Seems like a good, simple visual indicator.