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]

So we're using it again to upgrade from vancouver to washdc.  we have 6 instances, so I played a bit first with 2 of our subs.  ran it twice with re-clones from prod over the builder and consumer just to try the same upgrade again because the target version was a patch that disappeared from availability after we upgraded the builder to it, and couldn't target the consumer with the same version.  NOW- we're actually going through normal cycle for realz.  I'm getting ready to setup prod with retrieving and installing the plan- here's my question: when installing the plan- what subscription does everyone choose for the plan application itself?  i know in subs we could skip it, but in prod it requires a choice.

[Kristin J]

We chose ITSM simply because it was the first thing we implemented 😅   We didn't have anything happen that suggested that was a mistake. My opinion: I think the new subscription management stuff requires the mapping more on principle than actually needing a "correct" mapping, if you know what I mean. 

[frank121]

I am coming back to 2 years and would like to report that ServiceNow has addressed all of my concerns in Xanadu.

1. ServiceNow created a system property called "glide.upgrade.plan.include.skips" which can either put all of your skipped updates into the upgrade plan or not. I choose to put this value as false as this is what I beileve creates that global customizations scope which causes so many errors in the past. When you are done with you upgrade put all of your skipped updates into an update set and import it after upgrade plan is done in your consumer instances.

2. Upgrade plan now allows you to create multiple upgrade plans on the same version for different patches. If you upgrade to Zurich 1 and create your upgrade plan off that and then 3 days later comes Zurich patch 2 you can now upgrade your developer instance to patch 2 then create another upgrade plan and all of your plugin upgrades/installs will carry over to the new upgrade plan.

These 2 updates really make the upgrade plan worth it now in my opinion.

[Kristin J]

Throwback Friday? haha!  I continue to support upgrade plan. I essentially agree with your first point...that has made things much better. We do still include skipped record fixes with the upgrade plan, along with plugins, but we do not include any other fixes that occur from upgrade or plugins. We use update sets for that. I could get behind the way you're doing it as well and do both in update sets.

I don't think I knew about your second point! That is fantastic. We've had a couple times where the patch we were working with was close to disappearing due to a couple new patches being released. To confirm an example of what you're saying:

• Upgrade instance to Zurich Patch 1 & set instance to builder
• Install a few plugins
• Build Patch 1 plan
• Upgrade instance to Patch 2
• Build Patch 2 plan, and it will still include the plugins that were installed before building the Patch 1 plan?

I don't think I understand why that would work but sometimes I just have to stop questioning 😂

[frank121]

That is correct, you can de-activate the old patch in your developer instance and just work on the new one. Now i dont know if the skipped updates will carry over because like i said i skip them but i know for a fact that the plugins come over which i was surprised at first but im not going to complain.