Join the TechNow team and their very special guest, Jivanjot Kaur, Sr. Product Manager for upgrades at ServiceNow, as she takes you on a deep dive in to the game changing capabilities to help you upgrade and fast track your digital initiatives. We'll look at the new Upgrade Center and Automated Test Framework.

Originally aired: September 15, 2020 8:00 AM PT

Featured Experts

Jivanjot Kaur is Senior Product Manager at ServiceNow. She joined ServiceNow in 2014 and has served in the engineering organization as a developer for more than 4 years before moving onto Product Management. Her experience building and delivering numerous features and applications has helped her build expertise on the platform. She is now the Product Manager for ATF and Upgrades, and aims to further enhance the upgrades and automation testing experience for ServiceNow customers.

Chuck Tomasi is a Sr. Developer Evangelist for ServiceNow. He is a computer science major with over 35 years of IT experience. As a former ServiceNow customer, Chuck won the first Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge 10. Since joining ServiceNow in 2010 as a Technical Consultant, he has done many large scale ITSM implementations and custom applications, acted as an adjunct instructor for Education Services, created and lead the Technical Best Practices program, makes appearances on Live Coding Happy Hour, created dozens of fit for purpose custom applications, and co-hosts the ServiceNow series "TechNow".

Kreg Steppe is a Training and Certification Program Manager within ServiceNow developing and supporting cloud training infrastructure. He specializes in developing integration solutions, automating repeatable processes and Cloud Management in ITOM. Kreg's prior experience includes operating his own ISP, developing web applications in PHP, network integration, managing network support, Application Development on cloud based networks, DNS and email server maintenance. He is a Linux enthusiast and enjoys Photography.

Jeremy Duncan is a Platform Architect on the Innovation team at ServiceNow. Jeremy is an Enterprise Architect with over 16 years of IT and Service Management experience. His experience and certifications span across retail and manufacturing with focuses on hardware, software, and information security specialties. He has done many implementations in both the Enterprise Federal and Commercial spaces since 2011 and brings a breadth of platform knowledge that aids him in sound architectural decisions. He achieved his B.B.A. at MTSU and majored in Information Systems. He spends his free time fighting crime as a volunteer certified police officer in North Nashville since 2012 and enjoys family time, camping, with his wife and kids!

Links Mentioned

Questions and Answers

We currently use ServiceNow on premises. Will the Upgrade Center be available to us once we go to Paris?

Is Jumpstart service available now?

Is this available for Monthly Patching within a family?

Yes, once you upgrade to Paris, it will report available "in family" upgrades as well.

Can we also see health scan results

It's on the roadmap

HI All, Our company is planning to upgrade from NewYork to Paris. Could we get the new features, changed and deceased modules or so in Paris.

You definitely can upgrade from New York to Paris. Not sure what you mean by changed and deceased modules. Upgrade Center is available in Paris. Hence the name of today's episode "Simplify your next upgrade" :)

Does this work for Onprem customers?

how is skip processing automatically carried forward to higher instances? Is that through an update set?

when can we upgrade to paris

September 16, 2020

Can we also get the upgrade duration as prediction while we are previewing ?

When you schedule an upgrade for an instance, an estimated Upgrade Duration is calculated and shown in Scheduled Upgrade card in Upgrade Preview and Upgrade Monitor. It's subject to the condition that at least one of your other instances has already undergone the upgrade from current to the version the instnace is scheduled to upgrade to.

Can we see healtscan results as well

It's on the roadmap

upgrades have been great and this will make things easier but how do we know what skipped updates we bypassed in the past that may be referenced in the lastest updates or skipped updates

When you view a skip in VTB, you can see its previous resolution information. The old skip resolutions decisions will start getting captured from Paris onwards, so you will be able to see resolution history in your next upgrade.

Is the upgrade centre free or paid?

It comes free with the platform.

Can we request jumpstart for Paris upgrade?

“JumpStart your Upgrade” is a Customer Outcomes offering by invitation only. They hand-hold a customer through the upgrade process and teach them best practices. This initiative is led by Paul Voorn, we can reach out to him for any comments he'd like to add.

what about your BR or Script includes used in the previous version ?

Sorry, I didn't understand the scope of the question. If you like, please elaborate in the comments below.

FedRAMP Paris release date?

I am not aware of FedRAMP release dates

When you say they're carried forward, do you mean for the next upgrade on the same instance or for upgrading other instances?

For upgrading other instances. When you make your decisions and changes to skip records, those are recorded in the update set so when you get to prod, it already knows what you decided about those skip records.

How are those skip decisions carried from one instance to the next?

Update sets

Do you create an update set before starting?

Can we access this upgrade center dashboard from a New York / Orlando instance before upgrading to Paris?

No. This is a new feature in Paris. Hence the name of the title "Simplify your next upgrade" :)

As its part of Paris so do we have confirmed GA date for Paris release?

September 16, 2020

How this compares with the Jumpstart your upgrade?

Hopefully she answered your question (around the 10 minute mark.)

Can you include ATF tests and results in the upgrade preview?

It's on the roadmap

will there be a recording available for later view

Yes, the recording is available on YouTube in this article.

Does the Upgrade Center assessment need to be run only on Prod or non-prods?

For completeness, you would want to run it on each instance as you may have different changed in sub prod than prod.

once we are done with skip logs in one instance can we capture in update set and use the update set in another instance instead of going to all the skip logs?

Yes, in Paris the meta data is captured to the update sets and can be moved with the changes you made so you don't have to address skip logs again in prod.

How much time does the assessment take on average?

Not sure what they meant by 'assessment' per se; I am assuming it means Preview. For a moderately customized instance, a Preview for a different family release might take a approximatey 5 minutes to generate.

Can you explain in more detail on how the upgrade between instances works?

That's a fairly big topic, and available on the Success Center (https://servicenow.com/success). Suffice it to say, upgrade your sub prod instances, test, then upgrade prod. Remediate any findings in the upgrade as necessary (e.g. skipped records.)

Whats Chuck's favorite new feature in Paris?

SSO from OpenID providers.