Cloning From Sandbox To Dev, Dev To QA, QA To Production

[mrx]

We have four instances of ServiceNow.

I have went through and done some initial cleanup and made changes in the Sandbox environment.

I want to push those same changes in data and configuration up to Dev.

I tried Clone but got "Destination does not allow clone requests". Before I went any further, I want to make sure this is the correct process.

[Jim Coyne]

Just remember to remove it once you go live 🙂

[HugoFirst]

First of all, thank you for figuring this out. We're in Berlin and just about to do some cloning ourselves. This will certainly come in handy.

Secondly, this if off the topic of your question, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some of our experience.
Take it for whats it's worth as it is intended to be helpful, but NOT critical.

We used to follow a procedure similar to yours where we developed changes in one instance and then cloned the instance over the prod environment. We found that several "experiments" performed in our dev environment also made the transition to production. Which we had not intended.

As a result, we now develop in dev using update sets. We then appy the update sets from dev to test where our QA staff validate and verify the changes. Then we apply the update sets to production. To complete the development life cycle, if significant changes were made in dev (or test ) which were outside the update sets ( trial and error, experimental and exploratory work ), we clone the production instance back over dev and test before starting our next round of development.

Just a thought...