First time using clone Admin Console questions

[Briayan Hernand]

Hi everyone,

This is my first ever clone and upgrade, and I am the sole person managing ServiceNow at my company. The previous admin left about 7 months ago, and I started 3 months ago, so I am still learning our ServiceNow setup.

1. Exclusion List: It recommends turning off “exclude tables specified in exclusion list” since I am doing a full clone and upgrade. Should I actually do that as it seems that I shouldn't turn it off. But I am unsure

2. Excluding and Preserving Items: How can I avoid issues with LDAP, SSO, OKTA, spokes, etc.? Should I put them in both the exclusions and preservers? And if I add them how do I find the exact table for them to add them? I don’t want sub-prod information to start going out or mess up what is going on in sub-prods. The previous admin had issues with SSO, resulting in login problems to DEV & TEST environments after the clone.  I am particularly concerned about LDAP/SSO as I have no experience with them, and there is no documentation left by the previous admin. The last clone was done in July 2023.

3. Audit and Log Data: Should I turn off “Exclude Audit and log data”? I feel that since I am doing a full clone that I should leave it on. 

Fortunately, not a lot of custom development was done and I think most of it is out-of-box.

Any advice or best practices would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Bert_c1]

Hi Briayan,

for #1, Exclude tables will be empty on the target instance, so turn it off may be a good choice. For #2,to preserve SSO, see:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-platform-administration/page/administer/managing-data/conc...

for the other tables, if you go to a list view of the records you can see the table name in the browser URL. Add those to Data preservers

For #3, it is doubtful 'audit and log data' is useful, but if desired it'll increase the time of the clone process.