Environments

Last update: April 4, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Admin

Organize your sites and pre-production environments for easy management and separated reporting.

Hosts are bundled into environments for ease of management. For example, you might have dozens of hosts grouped in two or three environments. The preset environments include Production, Staging, and Development. You can add new environments and rename your environments, if desired.

One environment, the default environment, is pre-named Production. This default environment cannot be deleted, even if you rename it. Target assumes that this is where you will serve final, approved activities and tests.

When a Target request is received from new websites or domains, these new domains always appear in the Production environment. The Production environment cannot have its settings changed, so unknown or new sites are guaranteed to see only content that is active and ready. Host management also lets you easily ensure the quality of new activities and content in your test, staging, and development environments before you activate the activities.

IMPORTANT
Target users with Product Administrator and System Administrator rights can edit all settings on the Administration pages, regardless of their role in Target. Users without these permissions have read-only access to these settings.

To manage environments, click Administration > Environments.

Add an environment

  1. From the Environments list, click Add Environment.

  2. Specify a descriptive name for the environment.

  3. Specify the desired active mode for the environment: Active Activities or Active and Inactive Activities.

    If you specify Active and Inactive Activities, hosts from this environment also display inactive activities.

  4. Click Save.

Set the default environment for reporting

You can select the environment you want to use as the default for all activity reports.

If you use Production as your default, all unknown hosts automatically are added here and report data from there is included in the default report view. Instead, creating a “clean” environment ensures only your core sites/domains are included.

To set the default environment for reporting:

  1. From the Environments list, click the Star icon
NOTE
Recommendations users must rebuild their behavior database and product database if hosts switch host groups.
If you specify a default environment in an Adobe Experience Platform datastream, this setting overrides the setting in Target.

Change the name of an environment

  1. From the Environment list, click the Edit icon.
  2. Change the environment name.
  3. Click Save.