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?

[Adam43]

After Dev's upgrade ran, the Upgrade Monitor page did show a line item for records processed according to upgrade plan.  However- it also had a very similar number of skipped records (not exactly the same, but close) still to preview.  Similar mix of priority and application type too.  So- let's say I'm not super confident it actually applied what was included in the UP, even though it was fully installed.

Update to today- I was gone on Monday and our team decided to move up the next instance (UAT- where ATF team runs regression etc.)- so they missed retrieving and installing the UP there.  We've gone and manually run all the skipped records there, but for team training purposes- I've been asked about an attempt at retrieving and installing the UP in this UAT instance, even though it's already upgraded and skipped records have been processed.  My gut tells me to leave the UP out of that instance totally and train the team on prod or another instance we have.  Thoughts?

[Adam43]

fyi- also watched a great Platform Academy today that talked all things upgrade.  The host asked for loads of emails regarding challenges etc. so I'm pursuing that as well.  I'll let you go look it up to find Govind's email in the presentation, just so I don't cause accidental spam from here 😋

[frank121]

Hello all, After a full compelte cycle of the upgrade plan I WILL NOT be doing this again unless they make some pretty decent changes to it. I ran into two pretty big problems when upgrade day came and even after the upgrade.

1. I kept getting an error on some of the pluginswhen trying to push my upgrade plan to PROD. The errors just said to check logs but there are so many logs in ServiceNow I could not find where the log was for the error so I just de-activated that specific plugin and went on with the upgrade plan. I would then upgrade the plugin manually. I never got this error when pushing my upgrade up my stack. The error was because some plugins have dependencies of other plugins that requires payment or may not be entitled, if those plugins are not updated then the upgrade plan will come back with an error. The upgrade plan does not do a good job at telling which dependency plugins need to be updated it just shows an error on the original plugin and thats it. You dont get that error in sub prod because you basically have unlimited access to any plugin even if it costs something, you dont have to pay for it in subprod so the upgrade plan just updates everything. Very annoying.
2. This is the biggest problem we have had. The upgrade plan puts random records into a applicaiton scope called "Global Customizations - upgrade plan". ServiceNow has stated that global and global customization - upgrade plan are the same thing but they are not. They are two different scopes and they cause cross scope errors along with various other errors. They have an open case on it right now but once you use the upgrade plan and those records get put into that custom scope there is really nothing you can do about it. We were thankful to have another instance that we did not use the upgrade plan on and we just exported and imported those records we found under that custom scope and went on. The biggest problem we found was in flow designer. One of the complex objects was under that custom scope and it broke some of the functionality in flow designer. 

If they fix the above two problems we had then I would say use it. If they fix number 2 I would say use it as well. Problem 1 is just annoying since the logs did not tell much and you can manually update when going to prod if you want. Problem two is a much bigger deal, everything needs to be held to that global scope when using upgrade plan, once you start pushing stuff to a different scope, things get messed up.

[mfhaciahmetoglu]

We also had the same problem and had to clean "Global Customizations - upgrade plan" manually. 

[frank121]

How did you manually clean them up? Im still trying to figure out the best way to do this.