Clone Profile Error with Utah

[Chris Dea1]

Hi All,

Our instances are currently on Utah.  I am a relatively new admin and the earliest clones our organization performed were previously handled by someone else.  I worked on the last couple upgrades with the Utah upgrade being the most recent one several months ago.  We are upgrading to Vancouver soon and to prepare I went into our Prod instance to request a clone.  I selected the pre-existing "Dev" clone profile that I used when doing clones before the last couple upgrades, except this time I got an error I had not seen before "Preservers cannot be empty".  I Google'd and found this KB1431330 article.

Based on that KB, the solution is to add at least one preserver to the "Dev" clone profile.  And when I viewed the "Dev" clone profile in default view, indeed there are no preservers (or exclusions) set up on the clone profile.   This is somewhat confusing because in "clone profile view" it looks like there are preservers/exclusions but if you examine them they are for "System Profile".  The KB makes sense but this leaves me with questions and concerns.  

My question is if this error message only started with Utah release and we were always using the "Dev" clone profile, were we really not setting any preservers and exclusions on past clones from Prod to Dev/Test instances?  Or, behind the scenes were the preservers/exclusions from the "System Profile" being used even though the "Dev" clone profile was used (before Utah)?  I can see in clone history that that past clones uses the "Dev" clone profile.  Also, during the last clone (before upgrade to Utah) the SSO and MFA in our Dev/Test still worked normally.

My main concerns are related to SSO/Identity Provider settings getting messed up during the clone process.  Our instances (Prod, Dev, Test) use Azure for SSO and each instance is configured with specific settings for Azure (i.e. URLs, x.509 certificates).  I am also concerned about breaking MFA in Dev/Test during a clone.  (We use role-based MFA for admins.)

I contacted ServiceNow Support and honestly the answers I got were not too reassuring.  Basically I was told to use "System Profile" as the clone profile as being the most straightforward option.  The other option being to configure the "Dev" clone profile with preservers (and maybe exclusions) so I don't get the "Preservers cannot be empty" error.  

My goal is to just clone Prod to Dev/Test and have the same result as in the past -- I don't want to mess up any of the SSO or MFA settings.  I am leaning towards using the "System Profile" as the clone profile like ServiceNow Support suggested, however but I am still worried about the SSO/MFA settings breaking in Dev/Test after the clone.   

Has anyone run into this same clone error after Utah?   To get around the error, did anyone use "System Profile" to clone or did you create a custom clone profile?  How did you ensure SSO/MFA did not break after the clone from Prod to Dev/Test?  Any advice, example settings for setting up a clone profile with preservers/exclusions would be appreciated.

I am attaching screenshots showing the error and the "Dev" clone profile in "clone profile view" and "default view" to show what I am referring to above.

Thanks,

Chris

[Erica7]

Hello Chris,

I came across the same error in Vancouver release.  And this is the only post I see about the error.  Curious on how you proceeded.

[Chris Dea1]

Hi Erica,

Basically there's no way around it without adding at least one preserver of your own to the clone profile.  Main thing I had to realize is that the preservers shown on the "clone_profile" view of the clone profile are basically the default ones ServiceNow includes.   (If you change to "Default view" you probably won't see any preservers which is why the error comes up.) To not get the error, add at least one "custom" preserver (while in "Default view").  You could add any preserver you want really as long as there's at least one.  For example, you could add a preserver for something little; a preserver a custom system property you added (you can filter by name on the preserver).  

Hope that helps,

Chris

[Erica7]

Added a preserver and it worked!! Thanks again.