Best Way to Migrate KBAs from Production to Test Without Full Clone

[Andrew Meza]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for the best method to get all of my Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs) from our production instance into our test instance. I specifically want the articles and their full content to mirror production, but I can’t do a full clone because other teams are actively testing in the test environment.

Would exporting/importing via XML work for this? I had concerns that doing it that way might not bring over the full article content — just the metadata.

Has anyone done this successfully, or is there a better practice to keep KBAs in sync between environments without a full clone?

Thanks in advance!

[GlideFather]

Hi @Andrew Meza 
you can try the XML export on example of one or two and you will get an idea about the quality and formatting. But I don't see any problems with that, it should be 1:1.

Only thing that might be tricky are references... imagine a KB0001 with Author XYZ who doesn't exist in TEST, so you might need to export that person and eventually (de)activate it or to have some "dummy" fallback author. And this would be for all the referenced fields both OOTB and custom. Catalog, categories, etc. Same for user criteria unless it is already 1:1.

If it is really high number of records to migrate, you can ask ServiceNow for assistance, I think at least... :))

Also, if you decide to go with the XML part, set it by chunks, never ever export and then import all in one if there are too many articles, rather do it by smaller bulks. (e.g. by category, by author, by catalog)

[GlideFather]

Also, you should verify whether the KB number must be unique or not, because you might have some testing KB articles in TEST that might be "blocking" the PROD article with the same number.

So compare the numbers and eventually delete the test one or change it - KB0002 to KBT0002 - something like this.

[RayETCHU]

Hello Andrew, your knowledge base is a table of records in ServiceNow. You can simply export the knowledge articles from the knowledge base list view and import them into test instance. The main challenge is going to be if your articles have attachments associated with them. Your going to want to export the XML so that the article sys_ids remain the same after export. Please give it a try.