[Music] hello and welcome to tech now the webinar series that takes a look at a wide variety of platform topics this is for builders developers architects and admins of all skill levels and we are happy to have you here my name is chuck tomasi from servicenow and let me do a quick introduction been here for about 10 years of the organization was a customer for a couple of years before that doing implementations and what not my focus right now is generally around sharing platform information with you so you can build better integrations and custom applications number of hobbies but we're not going to get into that today we want to make sure we've got the maximum time for our topic and special guest so on to craig for his introduction all right here let me switch i don't know if you switch slides but there we go and i'm craig stepp i'm the here yeah i'm staff uh programmer uh for cloud labs and i handle all the infrastructure for our uh training department when we do the virtual training and you get an instance that's my handiwork in the background making it all happen uh do all the work for knowledge and a lot of the other conferences you may or even some snugs that you may uh may attend all the for any of those training workshops i specialize in cloud automation and i've been servicenow for about six and a half years now coming up on seven so yeah it's coming up fast and on to our special guest for today's topic hi uh my name is evan jod i'm a senior product manager with servicenow i've been with the firm for about six years uh started as a developer and worked on really cool projects like guided tours document viewer and integration hub now i'm part of the product management team and i take care of atf and upgrades i'm very excited for this session today and to share our latest paris offers with you all right our agenda today we are going to be talking about upgrade center that is our paris topic of the day we are we are i believe as of tomorrow september 16th the paris release will be generally available and you can start upgrading your subproud and broad instances to that release and one of the things you're going to get is upgrade center jivan's going to take you through all of the goodness of that and the uh some of the other stuff before we get into that i want a quick reminder that uh we are interested in the applications that you are building if you go to this bitly link and tell us about your app it makes it easy to remember doesn't it right you can uh you we will donate 50 to the un covet 19 response and recovery fund on your behalf up to five applications so up to 250 dollars to do some good in the world just by sharing what you're building on the now platform also want to remind you if you haven't already heard of this or subscribed or listened the break point podcast is the servicenow developer podcast our episode the day after we do this tech now is going to be a discussion with our special guest today g von kor happy to talk to her and i hope you get a chance to listen to that we put out a new episode every other wednesday and the occasional special episode as well so conversations with our product managers our product developers uh customers maybe even some special guests along the way so i invite you very much to look for that at the bitly link you see there bitly slash sn dash break dash point or you can find it on apple google spotify where you find your favorite podcast look for break point it's not any of the ones with the tennis ball i know that's a tennis term as well but developer oh but you're gonna i said you're breaking into a new uh new hobby no but they both are green right there's green in them yeah a quick reminder that this is a developer builder admin podcast and if you haven't done so already please we invite you to go over to developer.servicenow.com where you can get a free personal developer instance all the apis free learning plans blog events meetups with other developers around the world it's a great place to go to grow your network to grow your skill set and grow your advance your career become a servicenow developer the demand is higher than it's ever been for developers so at that i'm going to turn it over to given and take us through all of the upgrade center goodness sure thank you so much while there is no denying that upgrades bring a lot of value to you and your customers we realize that it can be a difficult subject we've talked to many of our customers to understand their main challenges and hesitations for upgrading understanding a lot of these challenges we have introduced a brand new product called the upgrade center in paris to address some of these concerns and to try to make the upgrade process easier and smoother the upgrade center represents a significant change for us because for the first time ever we are giving you upgrade insights in platform before even the update process begins you tell us what version or what release you are looking to upgrade to and we will provide a full impact assessment with visualizations showing potential skip records now you can see clearly how many records may be skipped and what the type of these skip records is this is a this allows you to start planning your resourcing and timing early and not just right before you upgrade but whenever you'd like to get a new update assessment once your upgrade is completed the update summary shows you a visual way to see your skip list profile including a breakdown by application and it gives you the ability to track all your skipped records using a visual dashboard to assign tasks and manage progress while dispositioning your skills let's start with something almost all of you are already familiar with the update summary page we have revamped the upgrade summary page that is shown after an upgrade finishes to show more data and information about the changes that happen to your instance in the upgrade being able to review the skipped items not just by priority but also by application and code changes helps you plan resourcing by identifying how many skip records are needed for the post upgrade remediation and what the skill set of those resources would be we've also used a visual dashboard that provides a new way to manage your skip files you can assign tasks to your skips and track the progress of your skip files using a btb the v2b doesn't replace the old and legacy way of managing your skips it's just rather additional supplementary layer on top of that saving the best for last let's talk about the new upgrade preview capability today an upgrade is a black box there is zero visibility into the aftermath of an upgrade until you actually upgrade an instance with preview you will be able to assess the impact of an upgrade on an instance without actually upgrading with preview will let you explore different release or patch versions that you are eligible to upgrade to and based on that version we generate a predicted list of items that we think would be skipped should you decide to upgrade to that version this list of predicted skips might change from version to version based on the customizations in your instance at that moment and the changes that are skipped in that version you can preview different release and patch versions and make an informed choice about version you want to upgrade to we sync with hi to get a list of these releases so the list is same as what you would see when you go to hide to substitute an upgrade so these are the pillars of the update center let's switch over to the demo and see it in action all right as soon as you log into a paris instance go to the update navigator type upgrade center to have a look at the new upgrade center menu let's begin by looking at upgrade preview and how it works you would select upgrade preview and it's going to open the preview page i have generated a preview for the sake of this demo so let's look at one already generated let's dive right in with upgrade preview you can evaluate a particular release for the impact of you on doubt having to upgrade to that version and i think with this upcoming two minutes of demo i'll be able to show you instead of just answering whether you need to jumpstart your upgrade or not at the very top you would you can see a drop down let's see what that drop down does in this drop down you can see multiple release versions that are available to you to upgrade to you can choose any specific relation that you want to preview this could be any valid family patch or hotfix higher than your current version that you're eligible to update to again we think this information with high so what you see in high is exactly what you see here let's generate up uh let's see what the preview would look like if you want to see your impact for upgrading to quebec patch too so select your patch 2 click on go we have already done that so so that's where you see a different button here let's say you are on paris patch 1 because you get upgrade center capabilities only after we update to paris and let's say you want to see what would happen to your instance when you when you would go to quebec patch 2 which at this moment is hypothetically the the most current version that you can upgrade to you click on a button to generate a preview and uh since you already generated that let's look at some of the components on the page at the very top you can see three cards on the first one you see information about your instance uh at the moment you can see that you're currently on paris patch one you can see when you last upgraded to that version and if uh if your instance is either at or about to reach end of life you can see that information here at the bottom as well in the middle card you see information about the version that you have decided to preview uh you see the version name and you can see when you created that preview as well so if you feel that that's a little stale you can go ahead and generate a fresh in the third card uh you can see information about any scheduled update on your instance so for example like here if i you have already scheduled an update for this instance you'll be able to see that version number the date of that instance and approximate and an approximate upgrade duration below this section you will see a couple of helpful links to see what is changing anything to look at release notes uh prvs and known errors for quebec patch 2 with these things now the most revolutionary part of upgrade preview is this section where you can see a predicted set of skipped items when you select a version to preview we generate a list of predictions of your skip list items between your current release version that's paris patch one and the version that you chose review in this version we decided to preview quebec patch 2 so this this is essentially a diff between paris patch 1 and quebec patch 2 for your instance again these predicted items are based on the state of your current instance and the state of your customizations in that instance and it is bound to change as you make changes to your instance and of course the definite list of skills would be different would be generated only after you actually upgrade an instance and at the end uh you will see uh information about your percentage atf results so you can make a decision on the health and weakness of your instance and just there's just to give you more supplementary information uh on you deciding to whether your instance is at the optimal health to upgrade or not another change we have made is with the upgrade summary page we have added more data in there to provide more insights about your upgrade after it's complete let's look at this new page and what the different components are at the top you will see information about your upgrade whether the update was successful which version you upgraded to the date the duration similar to preview you would see the the same helpful links here i'm sorry you would see the same helpful links about your release notes prbs and no errors now in the skipped record section uh you have the same information as preview but we've in summary what we have done is we have added charts that show the breakdown of skips by the product or application they belong to and whether or not they contain coaches this way you can assign individuals with the right skill set to review these skipped items each skipped items is also automatically assigned to a task and added to a visual dashboard you can access that passport from the skipped records vtb button and this is how it's going to look like you can you have the same labels added with respect to applications and code changes and you can also filter your priorities by skip so that you can start your skip management right from inside this weekdb another change that i cannot demo is how your skill resolution decisions are handled to make the task of managing skipped records across instances easier and more consistent we have enhanced the skip resolution process so that you no longer need to track your skipped items from one instance to the other they are automatically carried forward as you go through the upgrade process so that is the new update center it helps you do a proactive impact assessment with upgrade preview and address your upgrade planning questions helping you make informed decisions and increasing your confidence about upgrading to the next release with the improvements to upgrade summary the new upgrade vtb and changes to the script resolution process you have more efficient and productive skip management remember that you have to upgrade to the paris release before you can access this exciting new feature and with that check i'll turn it back to you all right somewhere i've got a mute button hiding behind one of these panels i was seriously answering questions we do have a number of questions that i think you can help with um the first one the one that i just answered somebody said when you make the changes to the skip logs you say i want to keep this and i want to release that and i'm going to revert this uh that information is captured in the update set so not only what you did but the decision you made about it so when you say oh i want to revert this it's not just capturing that in the update set but it's also capturing the decisions you made so you don't have to go through those same things on the same skip records in prod so huge savings in time there we did a little bit of this on live coding happy hour in august if you want to see that uh there's a couple of questions about on-prem is upgrade center supported with on-premise customers juvon uh it is but i think you have to refresh with hi uh to get that list of uh release versions that you are eligible to update to but yeah it is a work done okay wonderful another question can you include atf tests and results in the upgrade preview uh so upgrade preview you'll be in both upgrade preview and summary you will be able to see that your percentage etf passing results uh i'm not sure if uh what we mean by including adf test results in there but you're able to see your atf test percentage right in the update preview and sample pages okay so there's no way to run preview and say automatically launch my atf yeah you'd have to identify with sweets okay well that's something we look forward to you would have to have run your atf scripts you have to have run your apf scripts in advance all right still two separate processes uh let's see what else do we have and we talked about jumpstart and you're talking we had a lot previous to paris but uh this is for paris going forward yes hence the name of today's topic simplify your next upgrade so you got to get to paris to get upgrade center there's a carrot for you people this is one of the things in paris it's not available in orlando we're not reporting it to new york as much as we'd love to there are some technical reasons what that makes that very difficult but this is a paris feature and going forward your releases will be much much easier let me see craig you see it's an intensive for you to upgrade to paris so get to price faster and then you have access to update center let's see skip management is not yet applicable if you are just moving from orlando to paris that is if i understand the question you're correct i think i always skip processing automatically carried forward to higher instances is that through an update set yes i think we just explained that that the decisions you make to revert or merge or whatever right uh or skip is captured in the update set along with the changes you made so lots of questions on that we have a lot of common threads going here anything you see craig uh i think uh that well we pretty much answered the you know the bulk of uh the general themes i've seen i'm there are a couple others in here that look like their responses to questions one just says when when can we upgrade to paris september 16th is general availability that's when you'll start seeing it available yes yep which is tomorrow as we're recording this on september 15th so if you're watching this in the year 2029 you probably don't want to upgrade to paris 20 29. let's see something came in i'm it's scanning as quickly as we can to uh get these down there's a lot of repeat questions in here so apologies for that if we you know want to deep dive on any of the demo portions i am happy to do that since we have time i'm happy to dive into some of the demos also yeah are there if you've got a request for something you'd like to see a little deeper i mean aside from watching status bars go by and say please upgrade an instance for me and we don't have that much time that takes about an hour yeah it doesn't make for good content while we're waiting craig uh scan the uh q if anybody gets anything in there i do want to promote next month's tech now webinar episode that uh hopefully you could see that on the screen uh jivan you did stop screen sharing at some point right i'm not looking at the audience view oh yes i was looking at the audience view okay a little too many panels on the screen apologies that's the fun of doing this live uh we will be talking about one of the big new shiny platform features in sir in the paris release called process automation designer and its counterpart playbook which is the display the visualization portion of that we've got another one of our product managers joining us uh jaron guess is jumping in and he is the subject matter that will be showing subject matter expert that will be showing us around it's so big there's so much to cover we're actually doing this in two episodes so the first one is going to be october 20th that's why it says part one hope you can join us for that the registration link is up at bitly slash tn 80 reg go over tech now episode 80 registration you can make a mnemonic out of that right and start registering for that put it on your calendar 8 am on october 20th 2020. look forward to seeing you there it's going to be a wonderful time i'm looking forward to it because i've played around with process automation designer and there's lots of questions about how does this workflow engine tie into flow designer what what does it do how does it do it a lot of information he's going to be covering all of that it works with flow designer there to alleviate your fear i'll give you a little bit of sneak peek on that there you go yeah uh let me pull up any other reference information there's the doc site community we've got a complete list of well i want you to go over to developer.servicenow.com complete list of these techno episodes over in the community at bitly servicenow tech now you can find all 79 of them now over there including sign ups for the next one so craig what have we got um again i see a lot of repeat questions so i don't see anything uh that's jumping out at me that we need to talk about i mean a couple questions again about jump start as compared to this and upgrades for paris so again upgrades preparers should be available general reliability is tomorrow uh as of this recording so september 16th says although it's free is upgrade center automatically enabled after you upgrade to paris jivan what's your answer on that you're typing maybe she's answering the question uh with the keyboard uh short answer is yes it will be available on all instances after upgrade if it's not please reach out to customer support because it should be i haven't upgraded any of my instances and gone where's upgrade center now actually look forward to looking at so the upgrade center is on by default it's just sitting there ready yes yes you'll find it right under upgrade say upgrade center there's still upgrade monitor that sort of thing i think with that we do have a few unanswered questions but i don't know if we're gonna have a chance to scan them process them and and answer them all here we're going to end that at about the half hour i think this is one of our most concise technical episodes we've ever had yeah yes thank you very much that was good yeah good information if you do have any further questions you can always reach out to us via email twitter community you know where to go for that this will be on youtube in a day or so so watch for that we'll have that if you're watching on youtube later thank you very much don't forget to hit the like button subscribe notifications all that good stuff and uh with that i think we will talk to you again on the 20th if not sooner thank you very much to everyone who attended and we will say goodbye for now thank you yeah and thanks everybody [Music] you