First Time Using Upgrade Plan Help

[frank121]

Hello, we are upgrading to Vancouver and this is the first year we want to utilize upgrade plan. I watched the toolbox video and I still have a question. 

1. If we have a 3 Stack Dev - TEST - PROD how would it work if we upgrade DEV/TEST together? The way I understand it is you need to publish an upgrade plan BEFORE upgrade. Im upgrading DEV/TEST together so how do i get the updates from DEV to TEST once im done with my skipped updates? Can i consume the upgrade plan after I have upgraded already? I upgrade DEV/TEST together because we have our process owners do testing in TEST and our developers work on any issues in DEV. We still need time to look at the skipped updates BUT need TEST upgraded so our process owners can test. 
2. Can we add update sets to our upgrade plan? If a process owners defines a problem due to upgrade we want to fix it with an update set. Can we include that update set to plan or do those fixes need to be manually imported?

[Kristin J]

Hi there,

I have a similar environment and am trying to figure this out myself. I don't think you can use Upgrade Plan after you have upgraded. To my understanding, the way it works is that you create & publish the plan (like an application) from Dev, then install it on your Test instance before upgrade. Because the published Build Plan application includes all of your decisions regarding retained/reviewed skipped records and any new plugins/applications you activated, these are installed as part of the upgrade. When the upgrade is happening, it performs the changes that were included in the Upgrade Plan application. 

I don't think update sets are included in an Upgrade Plan...they are created and moved as usual with any development/fixes.

My team is considering using Upgrade Plan for our move to Vancouver, but we are thinking we'll bump our Dev upgrade to a day earlier than Test so that we can get our Upgrade Plan completed, and then upgrade Test that night so it's ready for our process owners the next day.

Then we'll work on fixes in Update Sets as per usual.

[frank121]

So i have gone through the process in our dev instances and here is what i found out.

Upgrade plan def need to be added to your producer instances BEFORE the upgrade. Whenever your upgrade hits it will pick up the upgrade plan and run with it. Because of this we are going to add an extra week between our DEV and TEST instance when we upgrade so we have time to upgrade plugins and do our skipped changes. I also noticed that because I rushed our upgrade plan we had some errors on plugins and even the global update set that gets created. I can tell you even if you have errors the upgrade plan will still work as long as its downloaded on your producer instance. I thought that because their were errors it would not pick up because it was not showing in our upgrade preview but when i logged in the next day the upgrade plan took effect.

[Simon Hendery]

Hi @williumj 

Why are you once again posting randomly about FaceApp and PikaShow here on the ServiceNow Community?

You are at risk of having your account deleted for spamming.

CC: @Dan Bruhn 

[JJ1]

I am also exploring the upgrade plan. We built the plan, and I expect that the upgrade plan will also capture the plugin/store app updates we made before creating the plan.

Also, I see a lot of scopes that I never touched during the upgrade process included in the upgrade plan; I believe those are due to past customization. Here are some articles and videos I watched that helped me get some ideas.

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1271313

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T13gbkrzft8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_vo5M46dSM

I will find out how smooth the process will be. I am concerned that capturing the past customizations under various scopes might break something during the installation.

Have you tried installing the upgrade plan and noticed any challenges? For example, I see that the global upgrade scope has way more files than I imagined; many customization that was done in the past through an update set got captured in the global upgrade scope. I am not sure if it will cause any issues after installing the upgrade plan.