ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ

DocumentationJourney Optimizer Home

[Limited availability]{class="badge informative"}

Journey Dry run journey-dry-run

Last update: Mon Jul 14 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

CREATED FOR:

  • Intermediate
  • User

Journey Dry run is a special journey publication mode in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Journey Optimizer that allows journey practitioners to test a journey using real production data without contacting real customers or updating profile information. This feature helps journey practitioners gain confidence in their journey design and audience targeting before publishing it live.

AVAILABILITY
This capability is only available for a set of organizations (Limited Availability), and will be rolled out globally in a future release.

Key benefits journey-dry-run-benefits

Journey Dry run boosts practitioner confidence and journey success by enabling safe, data-driven testing of customer journeys using real production data—without the risk of contacting customers or altering profile information. This feature empowers journey practitioners to validate audience reach and branch logic before going live, ensuring that journeys align with their intended business goals.

With Journey Dry run, you gain the ability to identify issues early, optimize targeting strategies, and improve journey design based on actual data—not assumptions. Integrated directly into the journey canvas, Dry run delivers intuitive reporting and visibility into key performance indicators, allowing teams to iterate confidently and streamline approval workflows. This enhances operational efficiency, reduces launch risk, and drives better customer engagement outcomes.

Ultimately, this feature improves time-to-value and reduces journey failures.

Journey Dry run brings:

  1. Safe testing environment: Profiles in Dry run mode are not contacted, ensuring no risk of sending communications or impacting live data.
  2. Audience insights: Journey practitioners can predict audience reachability at various journey nodes, including opt-outs, exclusions, and other conditions.
  3. Real-Time feedback: Metrics are displayed directly in the journey canvas, similar to live reporting, enabling journey practitioners to refine their journey design.

During the Dry run, the journey is executed with the following specificities:

  • Channel action nodes including Email, SMS or Push notifications are not executed
  • Custom actions are disabled during Dry run, and their responses are set to null
  • Wait nodes are bypassed during Dry run.
  • Data sources, including external data sources, are executed by default
CAUTION

  • Permissions to start Dry Run are restricted to users with the Publish journeys high-level permission. Permissions to stop Dry Run are restricted to users with the Manage journeys high-level permission. Learn more about managing Journey Optimizer users’ access rights in this section.

  • Before starting using the Dry run capability, read out the Guardrails and Limitations.

Start a Dry run journey-dry-run-start

You can use the Dry run capability in any Draft journey with no error.

To activate Dry run, follow these steps:

  1. Open the journey you want to test.

  2. Select the Dry run button.

    Start the journey dry run

  3. Confirm the publication.

    A status message, Activating Dry run, appears while the transition is happening.

  4. Once activated, the journey enters Dry run mode.

Monitor a Dry run journey-dry-monitor

Once the Dry mode publication is launched, you can visualize the journey execution and how profiles progress through journey branches and nodes.

Metrics are displayed directly in the journey canvas. Learn more about journey live reporting and metrics, in Live report in the journey canvas.

Monitor the journey dry run execution

You can also access the Last 24-hours reports and All-time reports for the Dry run. To access these reports, click the View report button on the upper-right corner of the journey canvas.

Access the reports for the journey dry run execution

CAUTION
Reporting data is available only when the Dry run is active. Once stopped, reporting data will no longer be accessible. Use the Export button above the reports to download them if needed.

Stop a Dry run journey-dry-run-stop

Dry run journeys must be stopped manually.

Click the Close button to end the test, and click Back to Draft to confirm.

Guardrails and limitations journey-dry-run-limitations

  • The Dry run mode is not available for journeys containing reaction events

  • Profiles in Dry run mode are counted towards engageable profiles

  • Journeys in Dry run mode are counted towards live journey quota

  • Dry run journeys do not impact business rules

  • When creating a new journey version, if a previous journey version is Live, then the Dry run activation is not allowed on the new version.

  • Journey Dry run generates stepEvents. These stepEvents have a specific flag and Dry run ID:

    • _experience.journeyOrchestration.stepEvents.inDryRun returns true if the Dry run is activated, and false otherwise
    • _experience.journeyOrchestration.stepEvents.dryRunID returns the ID of a dry run instance

  • When analysing journey reporting metrics using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform Query service, Dry Run-generated step events must be excluded. To perform this, set the inDryRun flag to false.

recommendation-more-help
91a6d90a-6d61-4a62-bbed-ae105e36a860