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Best Practice for Advising Clients on Optional ServiceNow Patch Notifications

mania
Tera Contributor

3 weeks ago

Hi,

I'm facing this scenario for the first time and would appreciate your guidance.

One of our clients received an Optional Patch Release Notification from ServiceNow for their Production instance. They asked the following:

"These updates here, should I be actively pushing them to my instance when released? I know they are optional, but in your opinion what is the best course of action?"

I understand these optional patches typically include security fixes, bug fixes, and performance improvements. However, I'm looking for the best practice on how to advise clients in this situation.

Specifically:

  • Do you recommend applying every optional patch, or only when it contains fixes relevant to the customer's environment?
  • Is it considered best practice to review the release notes first and then test the patch in a Sub-Production instance before scheduling it for Production?
  • How do you typically communicate these optional patch notifications to your clients?

I'd appreciate any recommendations or best practices that you follow when responding to customers about optional ServiceNow patch releases.

 

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Thank you in advance!

 

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Suryansh Verma
Mega Sage

3 weeks ago

@mania 

 

An optional patch notification should be treated as a trigger for assessment rather than a requirement to install every release immediately.

First identify whether the release is a standard patch, hotfix or security patch. Review the release notes, applicable security advisories, known errors and any open ServiceNow Support cases. Determine whether the fixes affect products, integrations or functionality used by the customer.

Applicable security fixes, critical defect resolutions and the current ServiceNow Patching Program target should generally be prioritised. A standalone hotfix should normally be applied only when it resolves a relevant issue, is recommended by ServiceNow Support or forms part of the current target version.

Apply the proposed version to a Production-like sub-production instance first. Complete smoke, regression, integration and business testing, review skipped changes and obtain change approval before scheduling Production.

The customer should maintain a regular patch-review cadence rather than either installing every optional patch immediately or ignoring all optional notifications. Any decision to defer should be documented with its reason, risk and next review date.

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