okay let's go ahead and get started thank you everybody for your patience and thanks everybody for joining today today is what to expect when you're upgrading best practices for making your service now upgrade a success my name is Scott J Cox and I lead our service management practice here at kava stick which is inclusive of our ServiceNow practice joining us today we also have John GU Betio he is one of our ServiceNow senior technical consultants and Kenny Wimberly he is one of our senior ServiceNow solutions architects a real quick overview of Kovac Kovac was founded back in 2001 we are headquartered in Kirkland Washington but we're considered to be a national practice we've got offices and resources all over the United States we have always been in the service management business so for the past 17 years we've done a lot of IT service management consulting we were technology agnostic until 2010 2012 timeframe and actually became a ServiceNow partner starting back in 2012 over 200 consultants over a hundred ServiceNow successful projects if you go to the partner finder page on the ServiceNow website that's a good opportunity to look up partners and look at statistics related to them one of our key statistics that were monitored and measured by by ServiceNow is our customer satisfaction rating which is currently a nine point six out of ten and then over 90 percent of our projects result in follow-on business as you can see from this slide we deliver services really across a lot of different industry verticals insurance education high-tech state and local government financial services retail and health care in terms of today's agenda so basically you know where do I start planning your upgrade while also talking a talk about testing and remediation that's pretty central to the whole upgrade process as part of that we'll also briefly discuss ServiceNow as automated testing framework or ATF finally we'll get into executing the actual upgrade validating success and then we should have time for Q&A at the end speaking of Q&A as we progress through today's session if you have any questions please feel free to type your question into the question field located on your control panel we'll do our very best to answer those questions at the end of the session but if for any reason we're unable to get to all of them we'll follow up via email also we are recording today's webinar and that webinar will be emailed out to this audience for playback or sharing with other members of your team who were unable to attend today's session so with that let's go ahead and get started so John I'll turn over to you all right Thank You Scott and thanks to everyone for joining us this morning so for those of you who are at the knowledge conference of course one of the big reveals was the roadmap and the naming of the future releases and so ServiceNow shared with the ServiceNow community that their quarters the first quarter and third quarter of the year they're going to be releasing major releases so in the past it used to be fun to try and guess what the release theme was going to be and now we've got them out through the next couple years so it's good to know when things are coming and what their names are going to be so most of us are for newer instances are probably on the Kingston release and then if you happen to be on an older release I know I've been working with some clients who are on they've recently been getting notifications that they're going to have to perform an upgrade to the Kingston release that's coming out in a couple weeks so service now releases their releases with what they call feature releases so these are the main releases that are named after world capitals within each feature release is what they call a patch release so right now I think we're on Kingston patch seven and so inside that inside a particular feature release as time progresses and new issues are identified and fixed those patch releases come out and those are cumulative so patch released seven will contain six five four three two one all the previous patches for that particular feature release and then periodically there's a security patch release normally these are issued to you if you have submitted an incident to ServiceNow and they have identified that there's a particular issue with your instance and so they release a security patch release for that so in the past these used to be like hot fixes for particular incidents that you might have submitted so if possible for your upgrade project it's best to try and go to the the highest release possible so for for now if you were upgrading you'd be trying to get to Kingston patch seven okay so easing some of your concerns with an upgrade so if if this is your if you're new on ServiceNow and perhaps the London release might be your first upgrade these are the types of things that you'll need to consider to help ease your concerns because of course an upgrade project is platform level so it's a large project and so there can be some anxiety and apprehension about it but fortunately with you know our arch our sharing today hopefully that'll help you for a successful upgrade so the first thing to consider are your customizations so if you are following best practices and you stuck to out of the box as much as possible you're going to reap that reward now with with your upgrades so if you minimize the customizations hopefully there'll be less things you'll need to remediate for your upgrades so again another reason like they mention that knowledge to stick to you out of the box as much as possible so that your upgrades go more smoothly the other area that you'll need to focus on are your integrations so if you've integrated with any sort of third-party tools like workday integrations hops ups ramp integrations or or Salesforce integrations if you've done any sort of integrations you're going to have to look at those very closely with the upgrade to make sure that those communications continue and then if you've activated any sort of additional plugins so if you've activated some additional functionality for your environment then you're going to have to pay attention to to that additional functionality and make sure you test it out during the upgrade testing process and then I Scott mentioned it's very important one of the key things here is to leave yourself plenty of time for testing so testing and I'll be mentioning this throughout the webinar is crucial for this for the upgrade project okay so getting started with your upgrades so some of the the crucial requirements are reviewing your release notes and the known errors portal and then certainly utilizing ServiceNow official upgrade checklist to make sure you're you're covering all your bases for the upgrade and then somebody from your team on the upgrade team is going to need hi axis so normally this is your system administrator or your product manager for ServiceNow and your company that have the ability to to login to ServiceNow customer support portal for hi access and then as I mentioned testing is crucial so we're going to have to get together all the individuals who play a role within or our stakeholders in the ServiceNow platform so we'll need assistance from the business process owners those would be your IT managers and your change managers to help out with testing and testing plans similarly we'll have to get in touch with our third-party vendors and integrations let them know hey we're going to need a little bit of your time to perform some unit testing with a new version of ServiceNow that were that we're upgrading to so we'll have to hopefully carve out a little bit of their time to help with testing then you'll need your subject matter experts in your power users so these these individuals are crucial because they're the ones that really use ServiceNow or tend to use ServiceNow very thoroughly and they can route out more accurately some of those harder to find bugs so I my projects I've had power users things that I had missed in my own little unit testing and they and because they're more thorough in the tool and use different areas of it in different sequences they were able to kind of route out at different issues so power users and subject matter experts are a huge help for the testing process likewise since we're performing an upgrade across the platform we're going to need our governance team involved so we need to make sure that they're they're aware of course that we're performing this platform level upgrade and that they're carving out the proper change request setting up the proper timing for the upgrade and kind of governing how their development and demands on ServiceNow are being processed and then finally last but certainly not least our in-house developers and our system administrators so these are the individuals that are going to be crew for helping us remediating sort of issues that are discovered through the testing so there's certainly critical and in a best-case scenario we've got them full you know mostly fully utilized for upgrade projects so so we've got access them to help help with issues okay so Cove Essex worked with a lot of clients to help them perform successful upgrades and so this is kind of our pathway to success for those projects and their upgrades so step one is their review reviewing those release notes so when London recently put them out on the dock site so you can start reading up on the release notes for the London release and reviewing that information I've got some screenshots coming up on that so I'll talk further there then we have completing a test plan so making sure you've got your incident management team identifying what's their critical path for testing similarly change management identifying you know the types of standard changes prior to changes emergency changes that they're going to need to test and likewise your your request management teams testing out the Service Catalog items and such for the upgrade once we've got the test plan assembled then we have to work on prepping our nonprofit environment for the upgrade so we'll you know we'll work on a clone from our Pradhan vironment down to our dev environment and we'll kind of freeze all develop an inner dev box and we'll upgrade that environment the nonprofit environment then as the upgrades occurring in that non production environment you can monitor the progress window this kind of I've got I'll show you and coming up with some screenshots about how the progress monitor looks and you can kind of monitor the progress of the upgrade in real time it's really cool functionality especially when you're upgrading your production box you can watch it in real time as it's occurring then well for success you need to review your upgrade logs and of course perform other remediation so this is kind of where you can leverage a partner assisting with those remediations in review of the upgrade logs then you also need to check your system logs and then then of course the most important part personally in my opinion is testing testing testing then we'll upgrade our other environments so if you're lucky enough to have a QA environment or a sandbox environment then you'll upgrade those environments as well to the new release and that's good because you get some additional timing to see how long that takes on those environments and kind of if it's consistent with your with your dev environments and then you'll prepare to upgrade your production environment so hopefully we've got a change window assigned for our upgrade after hours to minimize disruption and then finally we'll perform that upgrade in our production environment and lo and behold the happy event our upgrade competes and production everything's working smoothly and we're on the new release new functionality testing very critical okay so as we continue to plan for our upgrade it's important to review those release notes so the release notes provide us detailed information on what the new features are going to be so this this is your opportunity to say hey I wonder if that functionality that I've been waiting for or that my business process owner has been then asking for is now available in the new release so one service now puts that information out onto the dock site you're able to see what what new features and enhancements have occurred for that particular release so so a lot of times the past when I'm reading these I'm like oh cool we finally got this new functionality you know we finally got the the table variable so so this is this is actually a fun part for me is reviewing these needs these notes and seeing what new functionality that ServiceNow is going to provide for that release and then ServiceNow also has what they call an own air portal so the nor net no an air portal is your opportunity to look and see what sort of issues have been encountered for particularly patch release so again this is important to review so that so that you know of any known issues that might be related for that particular patch so this is an example screenshot of the known air portal and you'll notice here it breaks it down per family release and then on the left-hand side we've got Kingston and then it breaks it down per patch release so within there there's known issues or problems for that particular patch release so it's this is again another important area for you to review to see if there might be any issues that might impact your particular configurations and environment so these are accumulative so you'll read through patch seven then you'll click on patch six and read through that information so you kind of have to read through all the sub levels of the patch level that you're going from just to make sure you have a proper overview of the known issues for that particular release so when you're reviewing the release notes ServiceNow does an excellent job of breaking that down per feature area and per product area so if you so happen to just be using ServiceNow for insulin management you can focus your attention and your time on reading the areas of incident management that are going to be changed by this particular upgrade or our new functionality in there so this is really handy because you can basically send off to your incident manager just the link for the incident management area or change manager his area so that you know they can focus their time and effort on just their scope of the application so that they can review that section so that's really helpful Parr I really I really like how a service not kind of divvies up this release note they do an excellent job of kind of documenting it and making it very accessible for you to determine what's coming in the release and what's really impacting your area of focus okay so the next couple steps are to complete the upgrade planning checklist complete of course the important comprehensive test plan and then considering leveraging automated testing framework so in one of our previous webinars I discussed the automating testing framework and it's it's it's crucial functionality is basically for upgrade so it's it's to help you you know facilitate the testing of your upgrades so it's really comes into play for your upgrade projects that's kind of its its its strengths its helping out with these upgrade projects so if you hop out to the doc site there will be a checklist for that particular release so this is a screenshot of an example of the Kingston checklist and this again is super helpful in a critical document for your upgrade project so what it's going to do is its line by line phase by phase breaking down the important tasks that you should be performing for your upgrade and it's kind of handy because you can check off I usually print this PDF off PDF off I'm working through I'm saying yep I did check the release notes I did you know I did perform this particular step so it's really handy to make sure that you're covering all your bases for your upgrade so this is another great document that ServiceNow provides out on their document site for for facilitating your upgrade project so automating testing framework again this is its strength is helping you out with your upgrade project so with the automating testing framework we were able to test our forms we're able to test our service catalogs or business rules we're able to do this fairly quickly and we're also able to do it consistently so since it's programmatic it repeats those steps in the same order right so some of the limitations of course with human testers are they might skip a step or they might get it out of order and then that might cause a test to fail but with the beauty with the automated test framework is it's going to do that sequence a number of times you can also use it to repeat particular tests so you can kind of do a little bit of load testing on the new release and the beauty of ATF is it's not a third party app right so it's it comes native with ServiceNow so when we upgrade to the London release it's ready to go for us to perform those testings on the London release in our dev environment so so it's so that's the beauty of it it's not like it's a third party app that we have to go okay to use your third-party testing tool app ready to go for London yes it is okay now we can start easy nope it's ready to go when that new release comes out and the nice thing with the New London release is now that we're getting the ability to test service portal so we can a lot of us of course have service portal out there for our end users that's important functionality to test and so with the new london release we have new test steps to test service portal and service catalog so so some great enhancements coming in to the london release to help us with our with our our London upgrade okay this is one of my personal lessons learned so you know normally when we're admins on a day-to-day basis we're cloning from prod over to dev and we're getting ready for a new development cycle or a new release cycle we we know we exclude the the audit data and the attachments and such because normally we don't need that for for like 90% of our clones but a clone for the upgrade project is unique because we need to be able to get an accurate assessment of that upgrade for each file that we've got in our production environment it's crucial that we do what they call a full clone so we bring over those audit bugs or bring over those large attachments to the development environment and so my lessons learned from this was you know I was used to just cloning without those I cloned down to my Deb box we did an upgrade in the dev environment I started timeboxing I said okay the upgrade is gonna take about 90 minutes looks good well lo and behold we come and we perform that upgrade on our production and it turns out there was some new attribute added to the system iam o log and so the the upgrade and production had to process all of the email entries all of the email logs that have this new attribute and so it kind of threw the timing off of off of my production upgrade and so so it's critical I learned this firsthand critical make sure that you perform that full full on down to your sub production environment so you get the proper timing and time boxing for your upgrade planning so making sure you're gonna be able to fit within that maintenance window and you're gonna have your you know your upgrade go live bridge and such for the proper timing so okay I mentioned earlier that an individual from your upgrade team is going to need access to hide most likely this is your system admin so he he or she has the ability to get into the customer support portal at hi and this is where you have the opportunity to view which instances and versions you are entitled to so you you're entitled to particular releases for your environments and this is the interface where you'll get to schedule your upgrades and so you get to choose which instance that you want to perform that upgrade on and then you get to select which version and timing that you want that upgrade to occur so certainly somebody from the team from the project team for the upgrade has to have I at high axis so that we can communicate back to service now and basically their data center team to say hey this is the version that we would like to upgrade to this is our instance and this is the time so this is that this is where kind of the fun stuff happens in terms of scheduling your upgrade to occur on your on your different environments so once you've requested that upgrade to your environment what the service now is going to do it's going to issue a change request for for processing that that upgrades so it's going to be critical for you to make sure that you know you you you submitted that properly so of course you want to evaluate the configuration item and make sure that you've selected the proper instance so make sure make sure you've got your timing right for your production one for sure and then and your sub production ones and then double-check that plan start see so again that's when the service now is basically going to release to the monitor to say hey you're now you now have this new war file and you're entitled to taking this new release and then your scheduled job for update will will check basically and and detect that there's a new new release available for the instance and then that target version again is important to tech to double check to make sure that you're going to hopefully the highest patch level available for that particular family release so those are kind of the three main things you as assist administrator or the individual who's responsible for managing the high change request verify to make sure everything goes smoothly and is accurate okay so when that time rolls around the plan start time happens for the dead box and we that box detects that it's time to upgrade it'll start showing when you log in to the instance as an admin it'll show you the progress monitor so again this is really neat functionality I found it's super helpful for for my previous upgrade projects to kind of see the the the upgrade working along and so you get to see the up the the upgrade working for your platform updating your database schema and then depending on how many plugins you've activated it'll process of the updates for that those particular plugins and then the completing part is usually just some fixed grips and cleanups that that it has to run so that completing part usually runs pretty quickly I'm in the details part that's where I learned holy moly we're processing hundreds of system email logs so the details log is really cool it's telling you the exact file in the payload in that particular upgrade package that's being processed and then it breaks it down to the individual XML code actually so you can see with detail what is actually being upgraded at that point in time so that's great visibility and then down at the bottom is are the various nodes that are associated with your environment so of course because the upgrade is occurring at a platform level we need to upgrade the the nodes that are kind of linked together for that particular instance and so the nodes all the various notes kind of get upgraded together and most nearly all of mine have that of all that's all turned green so that's been happy so that's that's good stuff there all right so once the upgrade has completed then you will have what they call the upgrade summary report so the upgrade summary report is your first opportunity to see how how things ended up so it's kind of like showing us ok what's the work ahead of us so in this case this is an example of we had 108 skipped items so that means oh boy we've got 108 things to evaluate and to determine how we need to remediate those and then we also get our time boxing right so this is saying it took about an hour and two minutes for the upgrade to occur so again this is really helpful to keep track of this timing to help plan for you know how much time it's going to take for your production environment and then you can select down below you can select the individual individual nodes if you want to just kind of see how those ones process but the key things here are the duration so that's the amount of time it took and then the skipped update so that's kind of the work that you have ahead of you so this is where we are once this is completed now we have to actually start performing our regression testing so again we're going to be testing our core functionality or instead of management our user tables or email tables those core tables locations tables and such those core tables as well are applications that were using Swensen problem management change and request and then any sort of integration and it that we may have in our environment so this is where we kind of dig into the weeds and start working on the remediation so as an admin we have the ability to look at the upgrade history log so this gives us additional details on you know the changes that were skipped how many were applied and how many were overall processed so ServiceNow does a nice job of kind of giving us a priority for this and so it helps this kind of start off our start our focus on the remediation so so those higher priority ones obviously is kind of where we start off these are things that ServiceNow is identified has a high priority that's been skipped and it's certainly something that we want to evaluate and remediate but this is as mentioned this is the this is the time-consuming but extremely critical part this is like the heart of the upgrade project is remediating these skipped objects and working on it and this is where a partner can come into place so this is where our clients leverage Cova stick to help out with this analysis because we're looking at the different things that have been skipped you know making decisions on is this new functionality that they need what's the best way to perhaps merge this code how will this impact other configuration areas so it really takes that a bit of ServiceNow expertise to kind of determine how best to address these skipped items and and you know as a partner we have experience across all the different application areas and and a wealth of colleagues to to partner you know to collaborate with and say hey what you know what should we do with this particular skip thing and they may say well you know in the past for this particular one had success doing this so again this is where kind of where the partners can come into play and help you with this remediation so this is these are some screenshots of the examples of performing the remediation so ServiceNow fortunately does a really nice job of giving us as you know system admins and developers the ability to drill in line by line so on the left hand side you're seeing an example of something that's been skipped and an attribute fuel by field we get to determine okay yeah I do want to take some of the newer London functionality for that particular thing or no you know for my environment I need to retain I need to retain those that do you know the event manager needs to retain that particular role for this for this area of the system so so this is really cool interface that helps you to evaluate you know what things need to be merged and such and then sometimes you know it's like yeah we made that customization but you know what we don't actually really need that business process as much anymore and so this is our opportunity to take on and revert back to revert to the base system so we have we can revert back that skip thing and say yep you know what I like that new london functionality for this particular configuration in the area i'm going to you know revert back to the base system and get you know closer to a box close to the best practice and then there's a helpful field here called resolution and this is for the individuals who's performing the remediations most likely your your system administrators they get to log basically what they did so in this case we're saying you know what we reviewed this and we're going to go ahead and take this you know this system action this inbound email acts them back to how the box we're gonna revert it back and then if you perform some testing you say you know what who reverted aback the box but you know that might not work out too perfectly you can you can they even give us the option to reapply the changes so there's a lot of cool flexibility within ServiceNow to kind of address these skipped skipped upgrades and and remediate them okay so hopefully your system admins are fairly familiar with your day to day system logs prior to the upgrade but usually what I like to do is I'll take a peek out my dev box and kind of review some of the logs over the last couple days prior to upgrading and so I can know if basically use a pre-existing issue so in this example maybe we're encountering some sam'l layers so so then when you apply the upgrade you can do the Delta you can say okay are we getting new error messages from the upgrade that we need to investigate further and remediate so it's possible that we applied the upgrade and you know something disrupted one of our sam'l configuration so our multiple SSO might have got disrupted by the upgrade so by examining the err logs and the warning logs within the system that kind of clued us in to say okay this might be something we need to remediate so it's crucial that we investigate these logs and make sure we address any sort of issues that may have arisen from the new from the new release all right the crucial takeaway for today so as Henry Ford said quality means doing it right even when no one is looking right so if you really have a strong work ethic and you're really quiet you know a lot of our QA people and such and you you focus on quality nobody is looking around or over your shoulder anything but you're doing your own job of making sure that it's a quality job and so testing and testing and testing in a quality manner is really going to lead to the success of the upgrade project so this this is you know I you know we usually incentivize with little with little lunches with pizza and people come in and they perform their testing and so you can do different things that might might help facilitate testing with your company but but encouraging those this business process owners and power users and subject matter actors to really test out their areas so that we can we can convert out basically any sort of issues that may have arisen from the upgrade and we can get those remediations and get ahead of them again don't forget about the automated testing framework right so this is the beauty of ATF is we can leverage that automatic testing framework to perform this testing and hopefully we'll have you know root out any sort of issues and give better stability and better success with the upgrade projects project so main takeaway testing testing test okay so after we've done our thorough testing everyone's covered their bases and remediated stuff now it's time to proceed with the upgrade so again in our sub production environment we'll go ahead and perform those upgrades and we'll apply any sort of updates that fixes to usually your tests the remand so if you if you have three environments the dev test and prod then what happens is you'll upgrade your QA environment then we'll apply our update sets or remediation updates that's the QA environment and then we'll test and make sure yep we in fact we did remediated so so those those updates that's our opportunity basically it's a verify that our remediation update sets are working properly and preventing that particular issue with the upgrade after we've got everything squared away on our non production environments then we prepare for upgrading our production environment so of course hopefully we've got communication going out saying hey good news we've got London coming to the company you know some of those new features and functionalities you guys have been wanting or coming to the system and coming to the tool there's some cool new stuff that we get to do so you're communicating out to the broader company and stakeholders that the upgrade is coming then of course you're following your change management process within ServiceNow hopefully so you've got it scheduled it's approved we're all ready to go we've got our maintenance widow we've got our test plan implementation plan all that fun stuff is ready to go for the change management process to support the upgrade of course hopefully your main this should already be in place but hopefully your maintenance window for ServiceNow is outside of normal business hours so because the upgrade is occurring across the platform this is it's going basically it's going to you know take down normal services for for ServiceNow so this should be outside of your normal business hours when we're going to disrupt the environment as little as possible so sometimes I know some people kind of sneak in update sets during the normal business day that might be okay for those particular things but with an upgrade now you know this is platform level it's going to be taking a full processing of a service now to perform this and so you know we can't have people logging in trying to perform incident management type stuff and then finally well when that the day arrives we'll execute our upgrade so we'll be watching that upgrade monitor and making sure everything's progressing happily and then once the upgrade completes we'll apply those remediation updates that's in production and then we'll usually do I usually do some smoke testing and regression tests and make sure those are still happy and broad and then you're off to the races you you get to rejoice the upgrade is the upgrade is done and then we perform a post upgrade review right we kind of do lessons learn to make sure what things can we do better for for the next upgrade so good to kind of take take a look back and see what's there what areas can we improve upon because you know ServiceNow is constantly releasing brand new cool functionality as we saw on the first slide in the roadmap it's going to be q1 q3 and so we're going to be wanting to upgrade so that we can get take advantage of that new functionality and features from ServiceNow and leverage the most of our platform ok so let's kind of recap some of the some of our best practices for upgrades so when it's been done properly the first time it's going to make subsequent upgrades easier right so if you've been a long time customer and you've worked it you know you've already done Jakarta a Kingston and such upgrades you know you've more or less gone through the process and and it becomes easier because you've already kind of have your tests planned maybe you've released some new applications so you just have to add in a couple new test cases for some applications but more or less you know it since it's an ongoing process to support ServiceNow you you'll you'll keep keep improving it over time again my own personal lesson learned is when you're cloning to that sub production instance make sure you bring over those attachments and those audit logs so that we get proper timing and proper remediation of any of any sort of issues and then the unique thing about an upgrade project is its platform level right so we it's it's it's best for us to kind of freeze all development and that's kind of where our governments our governance board comes into play they're basically saying okay we've got to perform the upgrade it's going to take this amount of time so these particular development efforts kind of have to go on hold we're going to focus our energy on this upgrade project and then once that completes then we can kind of resume our demand management and release management for for ServiceNow so it's important to kind of put all your put all your focus on this upgrade process so that you know it gets done properly and then as timely as possible so again this is from personal experience really crucial to spend that time now during this upgrade process so that we don't you know we minimize and mitigate as much as possible any sort of key ones and fire drills so you know as this thing goes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure so hopefully we can find those issues like I was talking to a friend of mine actually this morning and he was finding some issues with the display of the catalog he's you know a lot of us have gotten the or some clients have gotten the notification that hey Kingston's coming out guess what it's ten Bulls good is gonna be is gonna be you know kind of phased out so the lot of people are going to have to be upgrading from Istanbul now and so he's actually working on that right now and so he found some issues hey this module for reports wasn't quite working and then the display for some of the Service Catalog breadcrumbs wasn't working properly but you know through evaluating he found that you know there is one of these things with a known issue and such so so it's crucial to find these things ahead of time so that you know you're not in production somebody goes to create a report and then the page doesn't know properly or they're trying to find their way through the Service Catalog and they're not seeing the the breadcrumbs properly so you know again performing that testing during the upgrade process is crucial and then at the end of the project again encouraging and facilitating a formal meeting hopefully to share our lessons learned so this is where we're kind of pulling together are this our you know our business process owners our speeds our power users any sort of integration partners anyone who is kind of involved in the upgrade project so that we can learn the lessons and then be able to perform it even better at the next time and then of course upgrade is kind of where your dirty laundry is aired right so if you've gone crazy and done tons of customizations and modified UI pages and UI macros and kind of really deviated a lot from out of the box that's going to come home to roost when we perform the upgrade we're gonna get those skipped upgrades and we're gonna kind of see see if areas that may have been you know overly customized and that are being you know their new functionalities and features might be skipped because of doing this upgrade process so reducing and eliminating those customizations is necessary so again this is an opportunity for us to say hey you know what yeah we did customize this in the past but we probably shouldn't have done that here's our opportunity we're going to revert back to out-of-the-box to the best practice for the London release and we'll get that new functionality and then an a recent lesson learned for me is you know if you hope if you so happen to be in a phase one and you know we've got we've got Kingston coming out in the next couple weeks here you know don't don't try and squeeze in a new new release version and in between your go live so if you're already past UAT and you've got everything tested out you know go ahead and let's just release on what we we've done our phase one on and then you know shortly thereafter we can we can perform we can perform the upgrade process so don't try and squeeze it in between let's let's let's stay solid on the release that we've already been doing our Devon UAT on and release with that and then shortly thereafter we can pick up the new new functionality in London okay so to summarize very crucial to review those release notes see what the new functionality and features are for the London release of course it's important to review your comprehensive test plan make sure we're testing all our bases our critical path information for incident management change management service catalog prepare those non production environments for the upgrade so freeze all our development for our different other projects and work on the upgraded environment upgrade in the development environment and then upgrade that non production environment and then monitor the process to kind of see how it's going and then we'll review those upgrade logs and perform the remediations and our dead box and then and then we'll check your system logs to see if any sort of new issues may have arisen and then stating it one more time here in red testing testing testing again critical for the success of your upgrade process that's the test as thoroughly as possible so we so we can kind of route out and remediate any issues that may arisen and then we'll prepare for your upgrade of production you update your production environment and then finally hooray we can rejoice we've successfully upgraded to you know Kingston or the London really so that kind of wraps it up here so Scott I'll go ahead and turn it back over to you for Q&A great thank you John sure let's see we have had a couple of questions come through Kenny I will serve this first one up to you obviously feel free to jump in as well John how do you get the most recent version of ServiceNow if it isn't in general availability for example when we need access to new features that will help our business we're not having them hinders our business so we get this question quite often you know we have a lot of customers that are interested in you know they go through knowledge and you know they talk about the next feature but the the next versions features and it's not actually available yet and so we have a lot of customers that are interested in what they see when they go to knowledge conferences and one thing that we have done in the past what we do is encourage them to speak to their Account Executive to see if they'd be considered for early adoption due to necessity but you got to keep in mind that there are risks involved when with this and and those should be taken in a careful consideration so just always be mindful of that you can ask that doesn't mean that ServiceNow is going to say yes but if there is a good business case for for a feature that you need that's not in your current GA version of ServiceNow they may make an exception for you okay thanks Kenny next one where do I find version specific links to the information mentioned earlier like the known errors and release notes so aside from you know your the dark side there is a specific area that you can look at when you're in the hi service portal and when you're in the hi service portal you can go to your instances go to manage instances from there and for your your instances that are entitled to an upgrade in the action there's an action drop-down that gives you an option to upgrade your instance when you click on that it will take you to a Service Catalog item that will up at the top give you a list of links and that list of links gives you up great product documentation release notes known error information an upgrade planning checklist and also a migration task for applications and features so there's links on the on the high service portal for for your entitled upgrade specific to that upgrade so we also do have at the end of this presentation a starting point which kind of gives you some links to the current release which is Kingston and then obviously if you once we get there you'll see the links if you just change that Kingston through London or you know whatever other versions you might be interested in you just change the name in that URL and that'll take you to those specific those specific links and documentation alright thanks Kenny hey and John maybe I'll send this one over to you I realized this varies widely from one company to another but on a very general average what length of time do you company spend planning testing and executing an upgrade yeah that's the next question so it really depends on the scope of how you're using ServiceNow so if you might be a smaller organization you're only working with an incident management you know then your upgrade project is going to you know maybe take a couple of weeks but if you're a large-scale enterprise organization you've got a lot of different integrations you're using nearly everything and some problem change you may even have HR and facilities going and service management so it's really it's really based on the scope of your usage of the platform so certainly the the more applications you're using the more the longer it's going to take you to know test those areas and get everybody involved so so kind of varies based on your based on your company's you know for my smaller companies we can get them done fairly quickly the larger enterprise once of course we've got more stakeholders more people more areas to test so it takes longer so base but it mostly depends on your scope and utilization of ServiceNow and how many people are you know involved in and using ServiceNow and what areas you're using so that's kind of the broad broad brushstroke if you will of kind of gauging it alright thanks John we've got a couple of specific questions here looks like they probably apply to some specific slides Kenny I'll pass this one back to you what what is the difference between skipped changes to review versus customizations unchanged so this is a common question we get from our customers as well and it's something that was added not too long ago - you're just your upgrade history log the skip changes to review are the actual ones that you want to pay attention to these are out of box out of box functionality that has changed in the newer release and that was customized by the customer these would be skipped during an upgrade so those are the ones you want to pay the closest attention to obviously the customizations that are unchanged it's just a log of things that that customers have changed over time but aren't affected by the upgrade and Kenny looks like a follow-on question to that and we'll probably wrap questions after this one what what does it mean when you see skipped errors so these are typically updates that were intended to be to modify system properties or scoped applications most of the time that's pretty much what I've seen when doing this is they reference a system property that or a scoped application that where where you have made a change in it shows up as I skipped error the best thing here to do is just review the Skip there and determine if there's anything that needs to be done with it okay great thanks Kenny and actually I think that covers all of the questions that have come in so far so if we have any others that come in before we close the webinar down we can get back to folks offline via email neck next slide we do have a couple of additional webinars and events coming up on September 6th we are sponsoring the ServiceNow user group in Charlotte I will personally be at that event along with a few other folks from our team the following week we are sponsoring the ServiceNow future of work tour in Seattle Cove ESIC is a sponsor there week of the 25th same event in Atlanta if you ever want to just check in and look at upcoming events like these as well as additional webinars please just visit our website let's see it looks like we've got listed here the the ATF webinar so John earlier in the presentation referred to the automated testing framework and a while back we actually delivered a webinar specific to that topic so again if you visit our website you can download a recording of that webinar so that that's it so I just want to thank everybody for making the time to visit with us today again we've got a ton of great resources available on our website if you attended today's webinar again we will also distribute a copy a recorded copy of the webinar so feel free to afford that to other colleagues within your organization so with that we'll go ahead and close down and thank you very much everybody for your time take care