# What is Cannot Reproduce?

> The status a ticket gets when engineering can't make the bug happen on their side.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/cannot-reproduce · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

Cannot reproduce (often 'CNR' or 'works on my machine') is the outcome when engineers follow the reported steps and don't see the issue. It's common when the bug depends on a specific account's data, configuration, region, or timing.

## Why it matters

CNR tickets are expensive. They bounce between customer, support, and engineering while the customer keeps hitting the problem. Most of them are reproducible once someone looks at the customer's actual environment instead of a clean test account.

## Best practices

1. Compare environments. Diff the customer's config, plan, feature flags, and data shape against the test setup.
2. Use production evidence. Search logs and traces for the customer's failing requests instead of trying to recreate them.
3. Ask for a time window. Exact timestamps turn a needle-in-a-haystack search into a short query.

## How Decimal helps

Decimal investigates against the customer's real logs, traces, and configuration, which is where most cannot-reproduce bugs actually live.

## Related terms

- [Reproduction (Repro)](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/reproduction): Making a reported bug happen again on purpose to confirm and study it.
- [Feature Flag](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/feature-flag): A switch that turns code paths on or off per customer without a deploy.
- [Observability](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/observability): How well you can understand a system's internal state from the data it emits.
- [Bug Report](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/bug-report): A write-up of unexpected behavior with enough detail for an engineer to reproduce it.

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