End of Family EOL Upgrade Zurich Guidance Needed on Zurich to Australia and Brazil Family Upgrade

[avinashnk]

Hi Everyone,

Our Norstella Production instance is currently on Zurich Patch 10 Hot Fix 4b W40.

We have an active Change Request for “Family EOL Upgrade: Install Australia Patch 6 W39 on SNC Instance - norstella.” The planned Start Date and End Date are December 1, 2026.

Could someone please help us clarify the below?

1. Can we assume that our target Production version will be Australia Patch 6 W39 on December 1, 2026, based on the current Change Request dates?
2. If our instance is upgraded from Zurich to Australia in the first week of November, will ServiceNow continue to provide support for the Zurich version until the planned upgrade date?
3. During the upgrade from Zurich to Australia, should we expect any Production downtime? If yes, what is the typical downtime we should plan for?

4. We currently have several customizations and integrations in our instance, including:

   • Jira and ServiceNow integration
   • Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow integration
   • Now Assist
   • Other existing ServiceNow customizations

   After the upgrade, should these continue to work as they do today, or should we expect any changes or issues that need to be tested?

5. If we upgrade from Zurich to Australia in the first week of November, and the Brazil family is released around the third week of November, what would be the recommended approach? Would it be better to remain on Australia for some time before moving to Brazil, or should we plan for another upgrade shortly after?
6. If we subsequently upgrade from Australia to Brazil, would there be another Production downtime window? Are there any specific considerations we should keep in mind for customizations, Jira/Teams integrations, and Now Assist?

We are trying to plan our Production upgrade carefully and want to understand the expected downtime, support coverage, and testing requirements before confirming the upgrade schedule.

Any recommendations or best practices from ServiceNow experts or customers who have recently gone through a family upgrade would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your guidance.

[Mark Manders · Accepted solution]

1. No. It will be updated to Brazil when Brazil is released. That should be in the email you received. This is just a placeholder at the moment. 

2. Zurich will remain supported until the final date you can move the upgrade to. Do realize that upgrading to Australia now, means that you also need to upgrade to Canada in May/June. Moving to Brazil will allow you to skip Canada and go to Denmark next year.

3. There is no downtime during an upgrade. However:

   - a user logged in on the first node that is going to be upgraded, will be logged out. They can continue their work after logging back in, but if you are in the middle of a 1M word knowledge article, you're not going to be happy

   - until the upgrade is finished and you have applied all fixes/changes you made on pre-prod, there could be some unwanted/expected things happening. People can work, but they are working on an instance that is upgrading.

4. Customizations aren't touched by ServiceNow. However: you should run through the skipped changes to see if any changes were done and see what you want to do with them. You also need to test everything, because even custom logic can rely on OOB logic that could be subject to change.

5. Some customers want to be the first and upgrade fast, some want to have the most stable version and go as late as possible. You will be amongst the latter if you go to Australia now (and, as previously mentioned, Canada will also be mandatory next year). Waiting for the Brazil release will give you the possibility to skip Australia. You can go to the change you mentioned and reschedule it to April 2027. An error message will show you that you can only postpone it to a certain date. That date will be the out-of-support date for Zurich and the final date you have to upgrade (either to Australia or Brazil). My advice: wait for Brazil, so you don't have to do Canada. Or do Brazil when Canada is released to have a more stable version (and Canada when Denmark is released, etc). That's really up to the strategy you want.

6. There isn't any downtime (see 3) and for the customizations, see 4.

Just prepare: check the release notes. What's new, what's changed and what's deprecated. And set a strategy: are you doing every release, but as late as possible, or are you skipping one and just do it once a year?