Upgrade to Orlando

[Padma17]

We are planning to upgrade our instances from Madrid to Orlando once it is released. But I heard that it is always a good practice to upgrade the instance following n-1 . I mean a version older than the new one to be on safe side without any negative impacts. Could you please suggest us to wait until the Paris release or can we upgrade the instance in March or so once the orlando is released.

[Keith Barrett]

Hey Mike - sorry for the delayed response, there's typically about a 60 day grace period after a release drops. What's most important is that if you're going to be out of your support entitlement term (e.g. N-1 or N-2) when Orlando drops, then you'll already be picked up by our End of Life program (EOL) and automatically be assigned a date post the Orlando release for the upgrade to occur. If you don't like the date we've picked, then you have to interact with the Change Request that's been automatically created in order to pick a date you want (within that 60ish day time frame), otherwise, the system will automatically do the upgrade on the date set by the system.

[Mike Duffy]

Thanks Keith, that is helpful. Yes, in December I think we got a notice for a Madrid to New York upgrade scheduled for mid April, so that seems in line with what you are stating here.  So, you technically can go past the new release that makes you N-2, but need to upgrade within 60 days.

[Keith Barrett]

Yes - and what's most important is that if you need to adjust the automatically assigned date, you can do so via HI - Manage Instance page or simply use the notes in the Change Request that came in the email and ask for the date to be changed to a date you specify. They are pretty flexible if you're engaged in the process, otherwise, they will simply upgrade the instance on the date the system selected if they've not had any input from you.

[Tony K]

Similar to what others have said, we wait until patch 2 or 3 is out of any new version. Waiting until patch 3 should be a safe bet for sure. 

[tjschmitt]

We normally stay one release back from current release unless there are compelling features in a new release that motivate us to upgrade.  I've used ServiceNow since the Berlin the release and there have been a few times that we've adopted a new release that's only had a patch or two issued and found significant defects.  In one case, the upgrade caused all of the custom attributes in the CMDB to be deleted from the database, although that occurred a few years ago.  Fortunately, we caught that before we upgraded production and was fixed by ServiceNow is a subsequent patch.

I view it as a risk/reward proposition.  Unless there's some valuable new feature or function you want to use, there can be little to gain from being an early adopter.   If there's a feature you have to have, I would say that it's worth trying the new release but otherwise, I would advise you to let the dust settle a bit.  Maybe four or five patches.