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‎09-17-2020 08:28 AM
Hello! I am a relatively new SNOW admin at my company and i'm working through the ITIL implementation currently. I am trying to come up with a standard on doing instance upgrades. How often do you upgrade your instance to the newest version? For instance, Paris just came out. Will you be upgrading to Paris within the next few weeks, skipping this release and waiting for the next, or waiting for Paris patch 2 or 3 before upgrading?
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‎09-17-2020 08:47 AM
Hello,
You'll most likely get a mix of responses regarding this but if you can afford to do so...staying at the latest version is always nice. I've done upgrades where we jump right to a version as soon as it comes out for general availability and then I've done upgrades where we waited until patch 2 or more...and then I've done upgrades where we were soooo behind that SN reached out and basically wanted to ensure we upgraded "soon" because we were many versions behind.
It all depends on your company's bandwidth to support doing the upgrades, the skill/experience of your SN team (Sys Admin) and how jacked up your environment is, haha, meaning how customized it is and how troublesome the upgrades become due to this.
If you've been with the company since they implemented SN and have knowledge and been a part of most of the development and you've followed best practices, then upgrading shouldn't be too time consuming or difficult.
If you're new to the company and devs that worked on various other customized things are now gone (so you don't have anyone to bounce questions on as to why this change was done and should you keep it or merge it or abandon it, etc.) and you've never done an upgrade before and...your version is several versions behind...it'll be a bit more difficult to get through.
So I've sort of given you the ideal approach and then the worst scenario that could happen.
Best of luck!
If you have the time, I'd recommend requesting an instance health check: https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/...
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‎09-17-2020 08:34 AM
As per Servicenow policy, you should be n-1 in terms of upgrade.
This usually means you will have to upgrade once in a year at minimum.
Regards,
Sachin
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‎09-17-2020 08:35 AM
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‎09-17-2020 08:35 AM
Hi David,
Regularly upgrading the NOW platform helps you leverage the latest features, reduce bugs and enhance platform stability and security.
Reference:
https://www.servicenow.com/success/playbook/upgrade-fast.html
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‎09-17-2020 08:36 AM
I think you'll find that many people are going to recommend waiting until patch 2 comes out of any release. It is more stable and allows others to have worked out the bugs. It's the same philosophy I've always followed.
In terms of upgrading, this I think is more mixed. Some companies don't have the time or resources to upgrade every version and will skip every other upgrade. I believe in going for every upgrade. Reason being is that A) you're already paying for all the improvements and B) if you skip one, you are basically doing two upgrades anyway as you are picking up everything in the version you skipped, so you'd have to read two sets of release notes anyway.
Hope that helps.
