During upgrade should the users be locked out

[FunToLearn]

We are working on Upgrading from New York to Orlando.

We are planning to do the upgrade during off-hours, where there may be minimum users in the environment.

Can users continue normal business or should we lock out users?

[Michael Jones - · Accepted solution]

You do not need to lock your users out during an upgrade; the entire process is done in such a way that there would be minimal (if any) impact to users, other than potentially having to log back in when the nodes actually switch. As long as you expect minimal usage I typically find it to not be an issue. That being said, there can be some slight impact.  

You can see some information related in this article: 

https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sysparm_article=KB0678054#q7

7. What happens in my instance during an upgrade?

During an upgrade, users can still be logged on to the instance and work as usual. There will be minimal impact and user connection will be reset once when the node to which user is connected to is getting upgraded.

Record creation and records created will not be impacted by the upgrade. Only the Scripts and the Schema will be modified via upgrade.

One node will be running the whole process by upgrading the node then triggering the upgrade of the Schema/DB. In parallel, it will run the upgrade on other nodes and after the upgrade, nodes will be restarted resetting the connections.

So once the nodes are restarted, the nodes will be in newer Version and the DB will not be in a newer version until the Database upgrade is completed. Even though record creations are not interrupted; my personal recommendation will be to restrict users during the upgrade. By this, the system can use all the available resources for the upgrade activity.

Hope this helps!

If this was helpful or correct, please be kind and click appropriately!

Michael Jones - Proud member of the CloudPires Team!

[peterdelf]

I've upgraded instances on 6 occasions, and patched dozens of times, but never had to lock users out.  I've always upgraded during quieter hours but people have been able to continue using the system.  ServiceNow take nodes out of the load balancer during upgrades while they upgrade them and then re-introduce them once they've finished upgrading.  On one occasion I've had a user that saw some screen artifacts due to cached browser files, but a quick browser refresh sorted those out.

[Sam Salameh]

You don't need to lockout users.

Do the upgrade off hours.

Communicate the upgrade/maintenance hours with all the users who use the system.

[Paul Curwen]

Although in theory as your nodes are upgraded separately the platform is never not available as such,  I still think it’s best practice to upgrade at a quiet time and inform the users on the run up to upgrade and during the upgrade.We use a pop up panel which is displayed when they login during upgrades.