Maintain catalog items between production and non-prod

[Joanna15]

Want to ask if anyone has any good practice in place in terms of managing catalog items between prod and non-prod instances. For example our catalog admin may want to make minor updates to catalog items in production directly, e.g. owner change, description change, aligned category, etc. A developer later may work on the development of the same catalog item in non-prod, hence he/she needs to ensure working on the latest version by bringing down what was changed in production. Interested in knowing if others have similar needs and how you effectively manage the process.  Thank you. 

[Joanna15 · Accepted solution]

Thank you Ankur for your quick response. Given these are minor catalog item changes, our catalog admin wants to get these done fairly quickly. Not sure if other organizations have similar ask and how people balance speed and the normal change promotion process. 

[Gunjan Kiratkar]

Hi @Joanna15 ,

It is actually bad practice but if we need changes in hurry then we can make that. Again if it is small changes.

In that case you will have to capture all the changes that you made in Prod and transfer that in DEV/UAT/Test environment so that catalog items will be in sync. 

We need to transfer the data between instances so that  sys_id will be same in both the instance. Hope that answers your question.

[Joanna15]

Thank you Gunjan. I wonder if you all follow the change promotion process for minor catalog item changes? 

[Gunjan Kiratkar]

Hi @Joanna15 

That is recommend way of doing the changes in servicenow. Even if it is minor we have to move the changes between instances otherwise we will acquire the habit of directly making changes on prod and it will disaster after some days if something went wrong.

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@Joanna15 

As mentioned it's not good practice to make changes directly in production.

I would recommend capture the changes in dev and migrate those to test and then to prod to identify any issues before hand.