What is Upgrade plan??

[Lucky1]

Hello all, 

I have seen docs on Service Now upgrade plan, and have some doubts.

Why do we build upgrade plan?

What all records we will add in upgrade plan ?

Do we build upgrade plan prior starting our service Now instances upgrade and after cloning non-prod instances?

Finally, for both non-prod and Prod instances do we build upgrade plan or only for non prod instances??

Please help me in understanding.

Thanks in advance 

Regards,

Pallavi

[Sujatha V M]

@Lucky1  Please refer the snippet and link for reference, your questions might be answered in detail too.  

Note: Clone lower instances with Production data and then go ahead with upgrade. 

ServiceNow Upgrade Policy : 

https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/workbook/upgr...

Please mark this as helpful and accept it as a solution if this resolves your query.

Thanks,

Sujatha V.M.

[Lucky1]

Hello Sujatha,

Please review my questions and can you please answer accordingly.

I have seen the docs also and read the same content.

There is an upgrade plan module in service-now. And we create records in that table. 

My question is,

when do we create records in that table? before upgrade or cloning?

and what happens if we don't create record in that table?

How the upgrade plan module work in service-now?

These are my questions.

If you can please answer my question in detail that would a great help now.

Regards,

Pallavi

[Sujatha V M]

@Lucky1 

1. Cloning of Production to lower instance will override the configurations. Its advised to take back-up of the ongoing activities or make sure you have moved those to QA before clone. So if you add any new records also, it will be overridden even tough there are exceptions. 

2. For any upgrade procedure, we raise a HI ticket and it's scheduled for planned activity.  

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0541128

3. If you have planned for upgrade, you need to have a freeze period and take up only emergency enhancements since one of your lower instance will be in different version compared to Production and it requires time to validate the existing configurations behavior on a high level.  

4. Post upgrade, you need to validate the "Skipped Records" in Upgrade monitor. 

Upgrade plan module isn't used by me but by having a overview, it seems to provide you preview of the how an upgrade looks like on a step by step procedure. 

Please mark this as helpful and accept it as a solution if this resolves your query.

Thanks,

Sujatha V.M.

[Lucky1]

Yes Sujatha,

Thanks for your response.

And yes, I am also looking for replies to my questions on Upgrade plan table.

Also, I have involved in complete end to end process of service-now version upgrade from cloning to testing and validating module by module.

But looking to find answers on Upgrade plan.

Regards,

Pallavi