[Music] happy day everyone i'm sorry i had to steal that from andrew we're still working on our intros welcome to creator toolbox this is a servicenow web series for you developers builders people of all skill levels to show you some new and interesting topical uh elements of the platform capabilities you can use they could be deeper into coding they could be no code they could be somewhere in between on that spectrum my name is chuck tomasi senior developer advocate at servicenow and i am really happy that brad is here because he's going to be doing the uh the topic today tell us give you well do your intro then tell us the topic i'm getting excited and getting ahead all right yeah brad tilton i am a developer advocate with the developer program here at servicenow and today we're going to be talking about upgrades in quebec and then a little bit about an upgrade feature that came out in paris but we couldn't use it in paris because it involves upgrading to the next release yeah that's that's that was the catch when we were doing the demos everybody's saying can i get this in orlando like no you have to upgrade to paris to get this so we're doing a step back because we're getting ready to upgrade some of our instances in the developer program to quebec and this is really going to give us good insights and save us some time i mean that's all everybody wants is right let's make that upgrade cycle shorter and shorter so that we can get to quebec or rome or san diego even quicker so anything else to announce before we get going i don't think so uh today's show we're going to talk about upgrade preview from paris then we'll talk about some of the optimizations we've made to upgrades unfortunately they're not very demo-able so we'll just kind of have to talk through them and then we'll take a look at some of the small changes that have been made to the upgrade center in quebec but if we're ready i can go ahead and share my screen and we can start by taking a look absolutely at the upgrade preview i think got it i'm sharing correctly all right uh so to get started in here uh one of the things that we released in the paris release is the ability to run uh this upgrade preview uh and what it does is it kind of previews the new upgrade before you actually run the upgrade in uh in that in that instance so you know this is really helpful especially i think for customers that don't have a lot of instances if you only have you know three instances in your stack uh it's it can be kind of difficult to find a time you know find the right time to start upgrading you know your dev or your test instance to take a look at the release and and all of those things so you really want to keep that cycle as short as possible so it doesn't interrupt your development cycles uh so the upgrade preview uh that came out uh we are looking at uh the upgrade preview page and so it is under upgrade center we released a few different things in upgrade center i think all of these i think upgrade center as a whole came out in paris yep yep and i love how it says paris patch 4b or quebec ea hotfix 2. easy to read you're not going into stats.two and going 2021-02-12 underscore sometime stamp like what release is this even somewhere in there it might say patch 4b yeah and and so this is uh i have already uh previewed this release because i wasn't quite sure how long it was going to take and it did take a little bit longer than i would want to do live on the show it was i mean it was only a few minutes but uh that's a little too much time for me to try to film pulled a cooking show on us i did but the cool thing about this is that uh you can really use uh any uh you know any release that's past your current release that you have access to upgrade to so this could be a patch or a hot fix it could be a full new release um but uh you know for this one we're going from paris to the latest version of quebec which this you know this will change very soon uh when patch one that's handy so because we always get questions from customers can i upgrade from say new york to quebec or new york to paris you could test it out and see what that impact is and it may get to be where hey you know what we just don't have time to address all these things we have to go to paris instead of quebec and then in three months we can look at quebec again yeah yeah so lots of lots of options there uh so you know i have some big uh some some big uh i guess cards here uh which is telling me you are on paris patch 4b uh and we are previewing uh quebec ea uh and if i had an upgrade that i had scheduled that would tell me when that was here so you know that this is a dashboard why i'm supposed to have all the information i need on this dashboard um so it created this preview and we're going to come back to the preview details but one of the cool things is it's giving me some more information about this release down here uh where i can uh view the fix problem so if we open this up this is docs and it is going to give me the prb release notes so i have access to that down here and it's going to also let me visit the known error portal so this will log me into support.servicenow.com where i can see kind of all the known errors i'm not going to log in because it also gives me other things on the page and i can see a lot of stuff in high so i'm not going to show that on this hang on a sec brad go back to that first link i noticed something it said view feed yeah it says personalized prb is that so that is taking into account apparently i didn't know this even existed but it knows where you're starting from and where you're going to so it knows which prb's to include on this yeah and so the cool thing about that is if you look at your personalized release notes oh come on really it's going to tell you uh this is for release notes upgrading from paris to quebec so if i was upgrading from orlando this is a recent change we made to docs if i was upgrading from orlando to quebec it would actually take all of the features in paris and quebec and put them together into a combined consolidated release notes and that was a big ask we had from customers because there are still a lot of customers that skip a release and they don't want to have to look at all the paris stuff and then look at all the quebec stuff so this just combines them together if i was skipping a release wow that gets one of these [Laughter] yeah our our team our product team for upgrades has really put in a lot of a lot in these last few releases both in the instance uh on high in the docks sorry not on high on support uh on on the docks and then i you know i think we may have something coming in the and the customer success center pretty soon as well that is around kind of upgrades and and personalizing that so you know it's really all about personalizing this so that you don't have to hunt down all of the things that are going to affect you and making these upgrades quicker and easier and pulling all of the data you need into one spot where was this when i was a customer that's right when uh they would release the uh you know the the new release notes on the wiki and uh you just you know i i'd block out four hours and just read through the release notes on the wiki four hours i was getting upgrades and then finding out what i just got oh hey this the prod was upgraded i wonder how that happened those were the days i do remember just taking an upgrade and prod and uh you know seeing how it went all right so the next thing uh really the you know the the big value here um is the the skipped list predictions uh so you know one of the big parts of the upgrade is when you upgrade there are maybe things that you have changed uh that are going to end up getting skipped because we don't want to overwrite any customizations you've made and so that's a really big part of any upgrade is kind of reviewing the skipped list and what got skipped and do i want to you know accept the remote change and things like that where this is going to let me preview that uh so i can kind of get a head start on you know what it is that that might be affected and i can kind of look at that before we actually do the upgrade you know so if your upgrade is you know maybe your company has some pretty strict uh rules on when you can upgrade and how often you can do that uh you know you could take a look at this now even though you're not gonna upgrade until you know june and and have a pretty good idea of what it's going to look like uh and then at the very bottom of this page it's telling you uh your atf results so it's actually looking at your most recent atf run and then telling you how much how much of it passed or failed this is really important this is a you know if you are using atf uh you need to make sure all your tests are they all pass before you upgrade because if you have a test and it fails before you upgrade then it's not going to be helpful to you after you upgrade because you're not going to know whether the upgrade made it fail or something else made it fail good point good point you need one yeah you want all your tests to pass and then when you upgrade the ones that fail you know that they have failed due to something that changed in the upgrade so that you know this is really um you know ensuring that you get the value you need out of atf all right so let's look at the preview details so i can get to this you know i could click into these individual records here but i like the preview details uh because it's gonna show me this preview um you know this is where we get into the uh the dates and everything uh that you were talking about check um but you know it shows me how long that preview took oh it only took a minute it seemed like longer than this but that's probably because i'm really impatient and then we have these four predicted skip records and so you can you know these are things where i think we can click into it and uh you know we have some similar options around the customizations i i haven't actually played with this and then upgraded but i am so i guess these are your choices you can either revert this to how it was before you customized it or you can say retain customization i don't know what this does uh to the uh to the skip list after you upgrade so if i were to say retain customization you know i does that skip is it already triaged after i upgrade i'm not sure what that looks like we'll have to figure that out at some point um but you know basically i've got my two options do i want to keep this do i want to do i want to revert it all right and that's i think about it as far as the preview goes uh did you notice anything you want to call out before we move on to uh i have another instance that's a cloned version of this one that has already been upgraded and so we can kind of take a look at some of the newer things in that instance so the the way that i understand it is and maybe this comes in your next instance is when you address those skip changes because this that was telling you the preview of what it's going to skip so you can see what the impact is but now when you go to the other instance you're going to start addressing those do i want to keep it do it correct yeah yeah so that's when you have that skip uh uh vtb uh the upgrade center vtv yeah that's what i was looking forward to yeah so let's uh get out of some of this stuff any good uh they're all good comments do we have any uh questions andrew's on he says happy day everyone all right so now we are going to take a look at uh a an instance that was upgraded uh so this is happens to be andrew's instance the but it is thanks andrew this is a clone of our dev program stack so this is our upgrade summary report so if i look at upgrade center and we look at the upgrade monitor this is what what i'm going to see here so the upgrade monitor is going to show you a lot of things during your upgrade i wasn't brave enough to try to make an upgrade happen during the show um that seemed like something i would probably not get the timing right so this is what it looks like after your upgrade is completed we actually did this upgrade uh you know a month and a half ago what was the fastest upgrade you've ever seen oh that's a good question i haven't i haven't been closely involved in an upgrade in like 10 years i think so you know when whenever i upgrade my my own instances i you know i don't really pay attention it usually happens in the middle of the night sometime and you get the email in the morning that says it's done i i and and what's nice now is at least as an admin you can log in and it will update if i understand it'll update the nodes individually so you can keep using paris paris paris paris until all the nodes are done and it goes okay hey guess what we're all on quebec here we go so it's no longer this outage window which i think is really nice um i think the fastest one i saw was an hour maybe an hour and a half okay really depends on how many plug-ins you've got how many um how many apps you've got running i mean if you're doing itsm and itbm and itom and csm you've got this heavier system and you've got 16 nodes out there it's going to take a while now a lot of ours for demo purposes are scaled way back so they'll go a little bit quicker yeah the plugins is a good point and we're going to take a look at uh something that we have uh that we have added in terms of how long it takes each of your plugins uh to upgrade uh so before we get into what's actually on this page uh i do want to talk about something that we can't demo uh but that that our our teams put a lot of uh energy into uh this release which is uh optimizing the upgrade speed uh so they've done some things around you know what actually happens during the upgrade uh to make it faster and they did a lot of testing and and it has actually sped up that process i don't know it's it's enough to be noticeable i think um but there are some things uh and and i'll get into a lot of details but it's basically just things like um there were a lot of inserts happening uh as far as like logging what's what's happening during an upgrade and a lot of that has been moved uh to a um like a cleanup job that happens after the upgrade so that your upgrade can finish and then this cleanup job runs and and you know does a lot of that logging for you so that you know the upgrade actually finishes quicker i don't know what release it was but several i want to say was a couple of years ago that they made a policy to say no table alters in minor releases in patch releases in hot fixes and that really cut down the the upgrade time in fact if you if you watch the status bar you can actually watch an upgrade happen uh it will say hey i'm installing plugins and then it skips right over this entire section so they've sped up the upgrades considerably by just considering things of that nature interesting i don't think i had uh realized that that's cool um one of the other things that it optimized is like fixed scripts with our plugins uh you know the way that those uh run now is a lot more efficiently when they run during the upgrade so those are just some optimizations hopefully you notice that it's gone a little faster uh in an upgrading uh to quebec um but but yeah so so performance optimizations in terms of the upgrade is one thing um another change is the uh database upgrade log has been split out into its own file so it used to be a part of your overall syslog file and it's now split out into its own file and you can access that by going to your upgrade history and then uh this is the one and then clicking into that upgrade record and it's now an attachment on that upgrade record and so that's that's your log file of just the upgrade uh and so that's that's pretty helpful if you are just wanting to take a look at uh you know the upgrade log itself uh because those you know those overall uh log files can get pretty large uh and uh you know working with them and poking through them to find what you need can be pretty difficult if you're only looking for something in the upgrade correct me if i'm wrong but in the upgrade history don't we also see uh apps push through the app repo uh so i thought that's where i saw that because i was i was upgrading an app and i went oh i can i can you know when did i go from 1.1 to 1.2 to 2.1 and so on and so forth and i thought that was in the upgrade history so one of the things that we have changed in quebec is it's actually we've split out some of those uh some of those things into their own um menu so previously i believe what was the name of that uh there was a upgrade was it system applications uh there is one under system application i'm trying to remember what the other one was called upgrade history system diagnostics yeah so in this upgrade history you would have all sorts of you know all sorts of things and one of the things we've done is we've actually split out i think if we look at history we have added three new app menu modules so one of them is my application import history under system applications uh so i don't have any under here so this is importing apps from source control i have not done that in uh in andrews instance and then another one is we have a plug-in installation history right so we're basically you know if you're storing the same list yeah they're all they're all things that are already there we're just you know making it easier to get uh to some of these and then what's the other one update set commit history is the other one that is now is now there uh so we've split that out just to kind of make things a little easier um you know most of these are based on you know customer feedback and and you know how can how can customers do things a little bit quicker and you know make these upgrades more smooth all right thank you thank you that that's very handy because a lot of times you're going who did this and when having logs of that and easy to find it's nice so if we go back to our upgrade um upgrade monitor here we can see you know how long it took and then we have some our same three links uh so these are still there they were in the preview before now they're in the upgrade monitor if i want to go take a look at you know what's what's new in these upgrades i have similar lists here the numbers don't match exactly and i'm going to say that's because i believe the the instances the versions are slightly different and this is an older clone so the uh the instances didn't line up exactly so he may not have been on paris patch 4b yeah yeah so some all of that may have been a little bit different so we have 11 instead of four perfectly realistic scenario for customers too yeah uh so we have the skipped record we'll get into that vtb uh in a minute but i want to show so these are all you know things that haven't changed from paris where we're looking at you know skip records by product uh code changed and unchanged um you know i don't have any atf tests in this instance and then we have individual node upgrades uh which is helpful so this is where it's going to tell me you know here's the nodes that are running we have some customers with many nodes this instance only has the two um and then then we have down at the bottom here we've got our top 10 fixed grips by duration so it's going to tell me you know how long each of these took um if i had schema changes uh how long those took and then this new one is the top 10 uh plug-ins by duration so these are you know your plug-ins uh that were uh upgraded and we can go in and actually take a look at so you know this uh slack uh plug-in took about two minutes uh it says or maybe it was more like two and a half minutes um but it's also going to tell me each of the plug-in files that were that were upgraded and how long each of them took and uh it they they make a big point to say that this number is not necessarily all of these numbers added up because there are some you know efficiencies and optimizations that are happening uh where hopefully i think this this goes a little quicker than just adding all these numbers up and if i recall that list also shows you the uh the plugins that are activated because sometimes when you go from paris to quebec it's like hey we're going to turn on these features by default for customers that are upgrading so you can see not only what was updated but what was activated as well yeah so uh this is uh so these were these were already here this top 10 plugins by duration is new in quebec uh so let's uh let's take a look at the vtv this is not a new feature it was already already there starting in paris but it is a good way to take a look at and triage your skipped records this is probably the coolest vtb i've ever seen mine are so simple they just have vertical lanes yeah so this is uh stacked by the state or it's uh grouped by the state and then we're stacking on the priority so it's automatically set a priority for these so we've got two and then i guess we have another nine that are priority uh five here so i guess we can look into one of these uh published update set ui action i always forget how to work vtvs because i don't i don't you're not just dragging them around or are you assigning what do you want to do oh yeah we can assign them so i could say you know hey i took a look at this we can review it um did it change the state yeah change the state for me i could assign it to uh let's assign it to andrew because he's not here you missed the meeting you get the action items assigned to andrew to take a look at uh and uh yeah there's no checklist so yeah the vtb for uh for your skips is here uh this is you know a thing that we had added uh in paris handy dandy and i think i'm at my the end of my you know list of things that has changed as far as upgrades go in the quebec release is there anything we haven't really looked at i don't think so uh oh there is a thing um i mentioned the um the upgrade log being extracted now that is a thing i guess this is just vtb uh there is a property uh where you can toggle that where you can say hey i don't want you know i don't want the upgrade log to be separated um and i believe there was something else in this release and i should have written it down uh but uh there are properties to control a lot of these changes if for whatever reason you didn't want one of these changes okay i like going to the upgrade monitor while the upgrade is happening that's where you see the fun status lines yes one of the one of the few status bars i enjoy watching how many plugins are there it's like i just did a quick android update on my phone and it's installing 39 of 412. that's right a lot of stuff in here yeah when i update my iphone it just tells me you have 87 minutes left or however long it takes um all right well i will uh stop sharing if there's nothing else all righty well thank you uh i almost said andrew thank you brother we're interchangeable uh quick announcements we do have a tech now coming up on the 23rd about app engine studio so join us as valerie myers christensen and chris haase two of our superstar uh product managers around aes will be joining us and showing that off next week on the 17th i do have a podcast on breakpoint coming out with chris haas we recorded that yesterday so we're going through the final edits and review to get that released to you so this is upgrade week join us friday for live coding happy hour where we will be doing instant scan so that's going to be interesting because this is a product that has sort of been behind the scenes and and a little what would you call it non-touch not high touch not low touch it was it was no touch uh you couldn't trigger it without involving servicenow previously and now that is at your disposal so this is going to be another one of those wow moments when you get to use instant scan to not only scan for potential issues before you upgrade but as you do your deployment so look for that on live coding happy hour there's a sao paulo meetup on thursday so devmeet up there we have any other dev meetups coming up that i should i think utah's got one coming up soon um oh check out the other one that i was thinking of check the events page go to the developer portal developer.servicenow.com connect events all of them will be there so looking forward to seeing you at some of those they're virtual now so you don't have to travel soon that's right if you find a if you find a dev meetup that looks interesting go ahead and join it you know you don't you don't have to be in the same location one of the you know silver linings for not being able to do these in-person dev meetups you bet well with that we're going to uh give you a short one they don't all have to be an hour on this show thank you brad and we will talk to everybody real soon be safe and see you again shortly take care everybody you