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Hi there,
In ServiceNow 911 with Omender Singh we touched on using Instance Scan and Flow Designer to find outdated Store Applications on your instance, and do a little bit of automation behind it. In this short article, a bit more information on this setup is given and the Instance Scan Table Check and Flow Designer Flow have been made available as Share project available for you to download.
Newer Store Application
Most ServiceNow Store Applications receive regular updates, which differ from the family release interval. Applying these updates needs to be done manually (or... when too far outdated Store Applications might be forced to update while performing a family release).
Keeping Store Applications up-to-date is something you want to do 😀. Applying the latest application enhancements will give you access to new application features, you can upgrade Store Applications at any time, since Store Applications are relatively small the impact is limited and easier to test, in most cases Store Applications are backward compatible so you don't have to wait on a new family release, and... keeping Store Applications up-to-date reduces the impact and duration of family releases.
Being aware of newer Store Applications can be done by subscribing to updates on the ServiceNow Store website. When a new Store Application is available, you will simply receive an email from ServiceNow. Another way can be using Instance Scan. Since that's in-platform, it also opens possibilities to automate follow-up steps or to report on this.
Instance Scan
Within your ServiceNow instance, in the Store Application table [sys_store_app] you can find the current version of the Store Applications on your instance and their latest version. Knowing this, it should be possible to create an Instance Scan Table Check to detect newer Store Application versions like below:
While trying to create such an Instance Scan Table Check you might encounter that the operation "is different" is not selectable. The operations available to select depend on the field type. If an operation is not available, don't immediately let this stop you! We know this is a valid operation, so be creative, how can we still apply this? The quickest way I can think of, is by using SN Utils 🙂. Dubbel clicking the label of the "Conditions" field would display the value of the field and allow you to edit this. The value we would like to apply is:
versionNSAMEASlatest_version
This workaround is validated and tested, it works perfectly fine!
This Instance Scan Table Check can be run manually or scheduled, as individual Scan Check or as part of a Scan Suite. If there are any newer Store Applications found, this will result in Scan Findings per individual Store Application.
Flow Designer
Having a Scan Check in place to detect newer Store Applications, opens up possibilities for further automation. Automatically scheduling the plugin installation for example, or creating a Task extended record. For this article we are opting for the later, create a Task extended record, a Story [rm_story].
The idea within this Flow Designer Flow is to trigger the Flow whenever a new Scan Finding is generated for Scan Check "Newer Store Application version available" and "Muted" is false. Within the Flow Designer Flow first the Store Application record is retrieved and then a check will be done if there is an active Story present already. Only if this is not the case, a new Story will be created. This is to avoid having multiple active Stories for the same Store Application.
This setup is very basic. Depending on your situation you could enhance the Flow Designer Flow or think of other automation to put in place. Just do some brainstorming and have a go at it! Post a comment on this article, to share your ideas.
Share
While you can re-create the above Instance Scan Table Check and Flow Designer Flow, I also made this available as a Share project:
- Finding newer Store Application versions with Instance Scan and Flow Designer
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That's it. Hope you like it. If any questions or remarks, let me know!
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Kind regards,
Mark Roethof
Independent ServiceNow Consultant
9x ServiceNow MVP
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I used this condition and it worked perfectly to create the needed Scan Results. Thanks for the tip, @Ken K
