Backing up and prepping update sets for upgrade

[Joel Pomales1]

Situation:

We are upgrading to London. Lower environments are already upgraded, and remediation work has been going on there. We have a number of update sets that we've worked on in the development instance. We want to clone down from production to test and reapply the update sets to make sure everything works. My developer will be taking a snapshot of the update sets and uploading to a git repository (and to a third party location via a plain text XML).

Question:

1. Is this the right approach?
2. Will the clone down blow away the update sets? (presume yes)
3. What are the recommended steps after the upgrade (i.e., reapply update sets from backup)

Did I miss anything?

Thanks.

[Prateek kumar]

Here is the best practices documentation.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-release-notes/page/release-notes/upgrades/upgrades-planning-checklist.html

https://www.servicenowelite.com/blog/2015/6/10/tips-for-upgrading-or-patching-your-servicenow-instance

[DScroggins · Accepted solution]

Hello,

Couple things to be aware of:

#1 If your sub-prod instances have been upgraded to London but your Prod Instance has not then you will have problems cloning down to the other instances as they will not be on the same family/patch. We have found that cloning down to different sub prod versions can introduce other 'issues' into the cloned instances.

#2. When you clone down YES everything (update sets, test records, etc) will be wiped out so you must back up whatever has not made its way to Production that you want to keep.

#3. After the clone you can re-import the backed up update sets into your development instance and then move it along through the other instances as necessary. For example if you had work that was committed in a Test instance but not Prod then you should re-import into Dev and then promote (through your normal process) the update set back into Test. If the update set was only 'In Progress' in Dev then you simply re-import into Dev and mark back 'In Progress'.

Hope this helps.

--David

[Mike Allen]

So, the update sets will be blown away.  Export them in whichever manner you see fit, and reimport after the clone.  Then thoroughly regression test everything.  That's what I did in a former life.