How often do you upgrade your instance to the latest version?

[David Gaddy]

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? 

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

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/...

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Shane J]

N-1, and I wouldn't even consider going to the latest release until patch 4 is out.

Even with that said, any new functionality I'd avoid putting a lot of time into, because you may end up doing a complete rebuild in the near future.  I've heard this was the case for people who moved to Mobile Agent early.

[Allen Andreas]

Indeed. As mentioned above, you'll get allllll sorts of replies back regarding when is the "best time" to upgrade, haha.

Thanks for your tips!

[Paul Ciarfella]

We are N-1.   We don't upgrade to the latest version until six months after general availability in order to allow others to find the latent bugs.  The assumption is that anything obvious or widely used that missed QA will be identified and fixed quickly.  Our regression test is also quick and cursory in some areas, where we focus on our customizations and assume basic platform functionality is correct.  Its worked well for us. 

We will take the risk and upgrade sooner if there is a critical new feature or enhancement, but as someone else said, there needs to be a minimum of two patches.

[SusanWinKY]

We have settled on this schedule:

• January - family upgrade
• April - patch
• July - family upgrade
• October - patch

We are currently on Orlando patch 5, hot fix 1, and will be applying the latest available Orlando patch in October.  We will upgrade to Paris in January.  Our goal is to wait until there are at least 3 patches available before we do a family upgrade, to better ensure the release is stable.