Skipped records reconciliations missing after applying upgrade plan.

[Christopher Sik]

We have been using upgrade plans for the last few months to manage our scheduled upgrades.
1) We create the upgrade plan in DEV.

2) We reconcile any skipped records in DEV using the Upgrade Monitor.

3) We refresh the upgrade plan and publish it. 

4) We go to our TEST instance and retrieve the upgrade plan.

5) In TEST we install the upgrade plan.

6) In TEST we review the Upgrade Monitor. (This is where we run into the problem.)

We're noticing that most of the skipped records we reconciled in DEV still show up as unreconciled after we apply the Upgrade Plan in TEST. The same thing happens when we apply the Upgrade Plan to PROD.

I thought the point of the Upgrade Plan was to avoid the need to manually re-reconcile the same skipped records in each instance.

I expect some variation in the count of skipped record between instances due to development in the platform and the time span between clone downs. And from patch to patch or hotfix to hotfix, there aren't usually that many records to review. So having to re-reconcile 20-30 records isn't such a big deal.

But this month we opted to jump from Tokyo to Vancouver and had close to 200 skipped records to work through. That took a couple of weeks to get through. We added detailed notes to each record, merged a large number of them, reverted a good chunk of them too. But all that reconciliation is not showing up in TEST after applying the upgrade plan.

Is anyone else encountering the same issue? Is there a setting or step that we're missing?

[MBarrott]

Encountering the same issue here - so the skipped records needed to be handled in an update set and THEN moved build the upgrade plan? Instructions from SNOW aren't the clearest on this. 

[Christophe_E]

My case is opened since one month now. ServiceNow is still investigating.

My advise:

-If you have new skipped record in Test, that were not in Dev, ensure all plugins are in same version on your instances

-if you have worked without updateset and only with upgrade plan, and that you encounter the same issue, you can apply your upgrade plan, and build a fix updateset for missing lines only.

[MBarrott]

Hi @Christophe_E, 

We were actually moving from DEV to PROD and noticed the issue. This was our very first time using an upgrade plan but I didn't see anywhere in the SNOW Docs which mentions needing an update set. 

We had something like 126 skipped records and none of them came over to PROD. 

[Christophe_E]

Hello MBarrott,

You're right, if you use Upgrade Plan, no more update set should be needed (and that one of the advantage!).

If I mention UpdateSet, it's only as a possible workaround if after installing your upgrade plan, you face the same issue as me (Many identical skipped record with a skipped record resolution were not solved through upgrade plan).

If it's not already done, you should of course open an Incident for that on ServiceNow Support.

Regards,

[Christophe_E]

Hi, I get a response from the support.

"

Solution Proposed:
As per the deep investigation on this we have found,
There are 31 skipped records in producer instance linked to applications that have not been captured in the upgrade plan. Out of these I suspect that 29 are related to applications that are not publishable to application repository therefore could not be handled by upgrade plan.
sys_properties_637f3482772321106b84a81f7f5a992e which is in global scope, is marked as private meaning that it is not intended to be deployed in another instance. Documentation explains the mechanism for update sets , however intention should be the same (not overwriting property in a target instance)

"

Conclusion (If my understanding is correct): You can use Upgrade plan only for scoped application skipped records. This will not work for global one.

This means that you cannot use only upgrade plan, and still need to use UpdateSet for skipped records in global scope.

I hope this will be enhanced in the future, as I like the Upgrade plan concept.