Too many differences when comparing Zendesk environments

When comparing two Zendesk environments as part of a deployment or workspace clone, you may get a message indicating that there were too many differences between the two environments. Salto supports showing up to 40,000 elements which differ between the environments.

When this happens, Salto will only show the first 40,000 differences, while other elements (exceeding the maximum allowed number) will not appear in the comparison.

This may prevent you from continuing with the deployment, as the desired elements for deploying may not show up in the comparison and will not be selectable.

Possible causes and solutions

There are multiple possible reasons for a large amount of differences between 2 environments:

If you're comparing an environment against its premium or standard Sandbox, you may need to re-create the Sandbox with the latest configuration from the Production environment.
Difference in the environment configuration - for example, the source environment may be configured to exclude specific items when fetching, but the target environment includes them. You can compare the configuration files and identify differences by using any online text comparison tool, such as Diffchecker. To fix this problem, make sure your environment configurations are similar, and that no major group of elements are included in one but excluded in the other.
If your omitInactive option is disabled in your environment configuration, you may be fetching in a lot of inactive elements which may be different across the two environments. Set this option to true to stop fetching inactive elements and reduce the number of differences.
1. To do this to a specific type, add the following to your environment configuration file (in this example, we omit inactive triggers):
```
zendesk {
  fetch = {
    omitInactive = {
      customizations = {
        trigger = true
      }
   ...
```
2. To do this by default to all zendesk types, add the following to your environment configuration:
```
zendesk {
  fetch = {
    omitInactive = {
      default = true
      customizations = {}
   ...
```
There may be real differences in element order, inside elements which contain lists.
Some feature may be enabled in one environment, but not in the other. To fix this, make sure both environments have a similar set of enabled features, or exclude feature-specific elements in your environment configuration (see #1 above to understand how).

If you're doing a comparison from a Workspace, you can set the comparison criteria to only compare some of the elements, by adding a criteria to the comparison:

If these don't help, you may want to simply reduce the number of elements that Salto manages. Change your fetch configuration to exclude elements until you're able to make the comparison you need.

You can have multiple environments, each with its own configuration, to help you manage, compare and deploy different types of elements.