Advantages of having a third instance

[Community Alums]

We currently have two instances and have gone live with Change as we're still working on Incident and Problem. I've noticed that only having two instances can be a little tricky as I can't just use dev as a sandbox to just test things as I often have to remember what I did and then undo them. I'm looking at convincing my manager that we need a third instance and looking for some reasons to justify the cost.

Those that have three instances, can you please give me some reasons and advantages of having a third instances? Those that have only two instances, can you please tell me if it's hindered your development in any way or if it's been sufficient for you?

Thanks,

Aryanos

[scottatah]

When we signed on with ServiceNow, much of their documentation on the wiki was written for three instances.   Unfortunately, due to the size of our company and in turn our contract we were only given 2.   We've made it work, however, there have definitely been pain-points.   There have been times during development work or during the testing of an upgrade that we've been unable to try and reproduce/test production issues due to the large differences between our environments.

[Community Alums]

Thanks for you input Scott. That's one of my concerns as well trying to fix an issue in prod but in order to do that we'd have to clone prod to dev and then may lose any development that we were working on in that instance.

[DChandlerKy]

We are lucky in that we have four instances (Dev, Test, Sandbox, Production.)

We let just about anyone in our organization go into sandbox and play.   If it breaks, no big deal - clone down and done.

We are working on tightening down our development cycle so that we move any change from Dev->Test->Prod.   For the most part this has worked really well for us in the past, but it might be sandbox instead of test depending on the last clone date.  

A habit that we have had since we went live two years ago, we clone test or sandbox within 1-2 hours of the upgrade so "IF" there is a problem we have an instance to fall back on while Prod is being worked on. (We have never had an issue with an upgrade - but this is a "cheap" insurance policy (if you will) and you aren't loosing any pending development from DEV when you do this.)

Another advantage of having at least one more sub-prod instance is to keep development, testing/training activities separate.   Also -- keep in mind that you can only upgrade an instance - there is no downgrade option.

Just a few thoughts.   Good luck!

Diana

[Community Alums]

Thanks Diana, you're lucky to have four instances and have that flexibility. I forgot about the upgrades and how that would affect development and testing so thanks for bringing that point up.