question Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version? in Upgrades and Patching forum

How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

David Gaddy — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:28:31 GMT

Hello! I am a relatively new SNOW admin at my company and i'm working through the ITIL implementation currently. I am trying to come up with a standard on doing instance upgrades. How often do you upgrade your instance to the newest version? For instance, Paris just came out. Will you be upgrading to Paris within the next few weeks, skipping this release and waiting for the next, or waiting for Paris patch 2 or 3 before upgrading?

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

sachin_namjoshi — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:34:24 GMT

As per Servicenow policy, you should be n-1 in terms of upgrade.

This usually means you will have to upgrade once in a year at minimum.

https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/legal/servicenow-upgrade-policy.pdf

Regards,

Sachin

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Jyoti8 — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:35:00 GMT

Hi David,

For better reference, refer below thread :

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_video&sys_id=353d649e1bde48107a5933f2cd4bcb6e

I hope it will help you.

Please Mark helpful and Correct, if it helps to you.

Thanks..!

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Pradeep Sharma — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:35:36 GMT

Hi David,

Regularly upgrading the NOW platform helps you leverage the latest features, reduce bugs and enhance platform stability and security.

Reference:

https://www.servicenowelite.com/blog/2015/6/10/tips-for-upgrading-or-patching-your-servicenow-instance

https://www.inry.com/insights/10-technical-best-practices-for-a-seamless-servicenow-upgrade#:~:text=ServiceNow%20releases%20an%20upgrade%20to,enhance%20platform%20stability%20and%20security.

https://www.servicenow.com/success/playbook/upgrade-fast.html

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Tony K — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:36:24 GMT

I think you'll find that many people are going to recommend waiting until patch 2 comes out of any release. It is more stable and allows others to have worked out the bugs. It's the same philosophy I've always followed.

In terms of upgrading, this I think is more mixed. Some companies don't have the time or resources to upgrade every version and will skip every other upgrade. I believe in going for every upgrade. Reason being is that A) you're already paying for all the improvements and B) if you skip one, you are basically doing two upgrades anyway as you are picking up everything in the version you skipped, so you'd have to read two sets of release notes anyway.

Hope that helps.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Allen Andreas — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 15:47:20 GMT

Hello,

You'll most likely get a mix of responses regarding this but if you can afford to do so...staying at the latest version is always nice. I've done upgrades where we jump right to a version as soon as it comes out for general availability and then I've done upgrades where we waited until patch 2 or more...and then I've done upgrades where we were soooo behind that SN reached out and basically wanted to ensure we upgraded "soon" because we were many versions behind.

It all depends on your company's bandwidth to support doing the upgrades, the skill/experience of your SN team (Sys Admin) and how jacked up your environment is, haha, meaning how customized it is and how troublesome the upgrades become due to this.

If you've been with the company since they implemented SN and have knowledge and been a part of most of the development and you've followed best practices, then upgrading shouldn't be too time consuming or difficult.

If you're new to the company and devs that worked on various other customized things are now gone (so you don't have anyone to bounce questions on as to why this change was done and should you keep it or merge it or abandon it, etc.) and you've never done an upgrade before and...your version is several versions behind...it'll be a bit more difficult to get through.

So I've sort of given you the ideal approach and then the worst scenario that could happen.

Best of luck!

If you have the time, I'd recommend requesting an instance health check: https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/health-scan-instance-health.pdf

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Paul Ciarfella — Thu, 17 Sep 2020 16:02:35 GMT

We are N-1. We don't upgrade to the latest version until six months after general availability in order to allow others to find the latent bugs. The assumption is that anything obvious or widely used that missed QA will be identified and fixed quickly. Our regression test is also quick and cursory in some areas, where we focus on our customizations and assume basic platform functionality is correct. Its worked well for us.

We will take the risk and upgrade sooner if there is a critical new feature or enhancement, but as someone else said, there needs to be a minimum of two patches.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Shane J — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 20:29:11 GMT

N-1, and I wouldn't even consider going to the latest release until patch 4 is out.

Even with that said, any new functionality I'd avoid putting a lot of time into, because you may end up doing a complete rebuild in the near future. I've heard this was the case for people who moved to Mobile Agent early.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Allen Andreas — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 20:31:45 GMT

Indeed. As mentioned above, you'll get allllll sorts of replies back regarding when is the "best time" to upgrade, haha.

Thanks for your tips!

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

SusanWinKY — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 19:20:13 GMT

We have settled on this schedule:

January - family upgrade
April - patch
July - family upgrade
October - patch

We are currently on Orlando patch 5, hot fix 1, and will be applying the latest available Orlando patch in October. We will upgrade to Paris in January. Our goal is to wait until there are at least 3 patches available before we do a family upgrade, to better ensure the release is stable.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

jeaninewilliams — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 23:33:12 GMT

Hi Susan,

ServiceNow can have a patch each month are you not applying these patches ?

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

SusanWinKY — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:06:23 GMT

We apply the required security patches during the 2nd and 3rd months of the quarter, but have only needed to do that once in the past two years. We do not apply other monthly patches aside from April and October.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

jeaninewilliams — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:12:21 GMT

Are you using ATF for testing each upgrade and patch ?

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Hitoshi Ozawa — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:19:46 GMT

Late in the game but my 2 cents worth.

the production instances are 1 version behind to ensure I have sufficient time to test thoroughly if all customization we've made works properly and to provide sufficient time for everybody to learn about the new features and changes. I have to update the user's guides and it's better to wait until GA comes out in chance that something may change before than.

Upgrade isn't just about having new features but on having end-users being able to use them.

However, I'm upgrading my personal instance before GA comes out to test new features and try to get any defects fixed and to get prepared so I'll have a better grasp of tasks that'll be necessary.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

SusanWinKY — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 16:52:17 GMT

Yes, however we are still maturing with ATF. We initially focused our ATF tests on customizations and are now starting to implement the quick start tests for OOB functionality. We also use the Test Management module (the original one, not 2.0) for testing functionality that cannot be automated. The process owners (i.e., change managers, incident managers, etc.) write the manual test cases, then my team automates what we can and leaves the rest for manual testing. We're just getting started on that transition from manual to automated.

Re: How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

Upgrade Expert — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 14:29:13 GMT

I agree with all of these posts that suggest staying current is really important. Forrester wrote a paper on the myriad of benefits - financial and user satisfaction etc. Upgrading ServiceNow can be tricky unless you have a best practice framework to follow. Our recommended framework is Plan -> Build Baseline Test Pack -> Upgrade -> Re-run Baseline Test Pack -> Compare results ->Fix and re-test -> Upgrade. There's obviously much more to each step than that and pitfalls to avoid, but that's the principle.