Excluding sys_properties table from clone

[todtoter]

Has anyone excluded the sys_properties table? Do you find it useful? There's been a few occasions where our clone has broken things b/c a dev or test system property was overwritten by prod. Instead of writing bunch of data preservers can I simply exclude the entire table? Does this go against best practices?

[Tony Chatfield1]

Hi, I would not consider this best practice, the purpose of a clone is to provide a sub-production instance that is a replica of production so that development can be undertaken and assessed in a like for like situation.

While there may be a few minor integration setting that need to be preserved, I would not expect there to be system properties that differed greatly between the 2 instances (with the exception of a theme used to ensure sub-prod is recognizable). I know may orgs use large numbers of custom exclusions and data preservers, but apart from preventing restricted access data from being pushed to sub-prod I am of the belief that these actions reduce the integrity of cloning and increase the chances of failed production updates.
Normally I would clone everything and then update any instance specific properties and configuration with a clone clean-up script, I would also update\reset the integration settings in this script regardless of the records being preserved\excluded, this ensures that you do minimize potential issues that would result from someone seleting the wrong exclusions\preservers.

[Bcrant]

The UI of the instances are different after the Clone - Support and Troubleshooting (servicenow.com)

Just for reference... We may or may not have done this. ha.