As we all learned in ServiceNow Fundamentals/System Administration training, Update Sets are the mechanism to move configurations from one instance to another. You build your enhancements in a lower level development instance and promote the changes forward using update sets. While powerful, update sets can be very challenging if you don't know what you are doing:
- Easy for additional items to get added to your update set by mistake that you don’t want
- Error prone in the target instance and problem reason/description is cryptic to understand
Moving Performance Analytics Dashboards, Reports, Indicators, Breakdowns, etc from instance to instance can be extremely challenging and time consuming. Out of the box, there are "unload" UI Actions that only capture part of the data necessary and some components may not be captured at all.
So how do you solve this challenge?!!
The concept of "forcing" or "adding" items to an update set via a UI Action has existed for many years; SN Guru explained how to do this back in 2011 on SNGuru.com. This method allows you to selectively choose what items from your instance to "force" into your selected update set. This approach allows you to create an update set on the fly. While quite powerful, you still need to have an understanding of the data model of the items you are pushing to make sure you include all the related components. If you miss something, errors will appear in the target instance or the report will not work at all.
Fortunately Ben Hollifield, Co-Founder of Yansa Labs, has been maintaining the very popular Add to Update Set Utility in ServiceNow Share that builds upon the solution that SN Guru documented years ago. The Add to Update Set Utility is a set of scripts that methodically add related records to an update set "automagically". This Utility has been used for several years by 1000's of customers, partners, and employees. Behind the scenes when you click the "Add to Update Set" Related Link on a record, it checks a list of pre-defined tables and will not only add the record you are currently viewing, but add other important related records too automatically. I have been partnering with Ben to enhance this useful utility over the past year and recently added functionality to also capture Performance Analytics components as well as NLU models. This utility has been around for years and it also includes a lot of other great additions. All of the components included are documented in ServiceNow Share.
How do I add this solution to my instance?
If you are not familiar with ServiceNow Share, this is a site where ServiceNow employees, partners, and customers can share useful utilities, applications, widgets, etc that they developed with the ServiceNow Community free of charge. This site has been around for many years and includes tons of content that you may also find useful.
- Download the update set from Share. Navigate to the Add to Update Utility details page, and click the Download button. You will need to login in order to download the update set. If you don't have a Developer Portal login, you can easily register for one..
- In your ServiceNow instance, navigate to System Update Sets \ Retrieved Update Sets and import the Add to Update Set Global v*.xml. Preview it and Commit it. Please refer to Update Set Transfers on ServiceNow Docs for further details.
How to use this solution?
- A global "Add to Update Set" UI Action is included with this solution. This will appear on any record that has "Related Links" towards the bottom of the form. By default it is only available to users with the "admin" role assigned since the Admin role is required to manage update sets.
- Create a new update set and make it your current set.
- Navigate to the records you want to add to the update set and click Add to Update Set under Related Links.
- Since Dashboards and Reports are using custom UI's you will need to navigate to the record directly via the Filter Navigator:
-
- Performance Analytics Dashboards: enter pa_dashboards.list and hit enter
- Homepages: enter sys_portal_page.list and hit enter
- Reports: enter sys_report.list and hit enter
- Then open a record to find the Add to Update Set UI action under Related Links
- Note: if you need to add multiple records, Add to Update Set is also a List UI Action meaning you will find it in the "Actions on selected rows" drop down at the bottom of lists. You can check or filter for the items you want to add via the list, check the items you want and choose Add to Update Set in the bottom drop down.
Please note that the Add to Update Set Utility can also capture components of Performance Analytics as well. You can capture the following components and its child related items:
- PA Dashboard
- Portal Page
- Report
- PA Widget
- Indicator Source
- Indicator
- Breakdown Source
- Breakdown
What if I want to learn more?
The Add to Update Set Utility is further documented in the Developer Community in a Blog Article called Add to Update Set Utility Documentation and Custom Configurations.
Please post comments here or on Share if you have any questions or ideas for improvement!
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