Replacing Personal Agents with a dedicated Sandbox environment
We’re sunsetting the personal agent and replacing it with a first-class Sandbox environment now included on every paying plan.
By Thomas di Luccio, on Jun 19, 2026 Two things are changing in Blackfire. One is being removed. One is being added. Here’s the full picture.
What’s being removed: Personal Agent
Personal Agent is a feature that let an individual developer associated to a paying organization trigger deterministic profiles outside of a team workflow. It was useful for side experiments, one-off investigations, or tinkering that you didn’t want mixed into the production data.
It was real, but it was also little-known. More importantly, the way it was implemented added a significant layer of conditional logic throughout the platform. As we work on laying new grounds for Blackfire’s future, that complexity was a quiet tax on every change we shipped.
What’s replacing it: a Sandbox environment now included with every paying plan
The use case Personal Agent served was legitimate: a dedicated space for deterministic profiles that stays separate from production. We’re not removing that use case. We’re giving it a proper home.
Starting now, every paying plan includes one dedicated Sandbox environment at no extra cost.
The Sandbox is a first-class environment in Blackfire. You can run deterministic profiles, reproduce issues in isolation, test instrumentation changes, or hand off a profiling context to a colleague.
It works the same way your other environments do, which means no new concepts to learn and no special-casing in how you set it up.
What you need to do
If you were using Personal Agent, your Sandbox environment is the replacement. You won’t lose the ability to run isolated, deterministic profiles. You’ll just do it from an environment that’s properly integrated into the platform.
For most users, the migration is straightforward: set up your Sandbox environment the same way you’d configure any other Blackfire environment. The blackfire agent:config command now includes an interactive wizard both guiding you and doing the heavy lifting.
If you have questions about the transition or run into anything unexpected, reach out to support. We’ll help you get sorted.
To better observability and beyond
