today's session is all about leveraging platform capabilities for a smoother upgrade this Safe Harbor notice is here just to let you know that some of this presentation may contain forward-looking statements and to not make any purchase decisions based on those forward-looking statements my name is shimail adastery and I support our customers with upgrades here at servicenow and I'm joined virtually by Adam Stout director of outbound product management just a couple of housekeeping things before we kick off there will be time at the end of today's presentation for Q a so do keep your questions coming along the way you can use the Q a function right at the bottom of your screen today's session will be recorded and shared on the servicenow community after the session in case you want to go look back at the recording or grab any resources or links and after the session you will be prompted to fill out a short survey in your browser we really do appreciate the feedback let us know what you thought about today's session if you have any suggestions for future event topics we'd love to hear those as well all right so today's session is all about leveraging platform capabilities for a smoother upgrade I'll start by reviewing the servicenow upgrade policy and the value of staying current we will discuss platform capabilities such as ATF instant scan and upgrade Center Adam has some really awesome demos planned for us today we will also discuss some new features within our platform Tokyo release and today you'll walk away with links to essential resources that can help with your next upgrade and don't worry because we have saved time at the end of the day for live q a as I mentioned before use the Q a button at the bottom of your screen to ask questions along the way if you've been on a session with me before you know that I love uh the poll questions so I've got a poll for you today what release version are you on you should see it pop up on your screen are you on Quebec Rome San Diego maybe you've already upgraded to Tokyo all right thanks for filling that out folks so it looks like most of our audience today is on San Diego we've got some folks on Rome and Quebec as well um so the session will definitely be very valuable as I'm sure you are planning an upgrade soon and before going any further let's quickly review the servicenow upgrade policy servicenow customers need to be on one of the two most current releases to be on a supported version here support means access to world-class technical help 24 hours a day seven days a week this help also includes support with patches and hot fixes it also means that customers will need to upgrade at least once a year to stay current so today the most current releases are Tokyo which is referred to here as n and San Diego which is referred to as n minus one so looking at this chart below are customers with n minus one entitlement on Rome or earlier or customers with n minus two entitlement on Quebec or earlier we're due for an upgrade to Tokyo last month or I guess now it's officially November two months ago and for our customers with and minus two entitlement on the roam release or n minus one entitlement on San Diego or earlier you are due for an upgrade in March of next year so if you're unsure about your support entitlement you can find this information on the now support portal or by reaching out to your SC foreign got another poll here for you should pop up on your screen are you planning to upgrade to the Tokyo release yes not sure no we've already upgraded to Tokyo or are you in the progress of upgrading to Tokyo thank you for filling out the survey I appreciate it focused a couple more seconds here I'm sorry so it looks like most folks um are either in the progress of upgrading there or they're planning to upgrade or they're not quite sure yet if they're planning to upgrade to the Tokyo release and so customers get the best out of service now and they upgrade to the latest release not only will you receive the latest in platform and security enhancements but also be able to access the new products applications and features that come with a new release and customers who upgrade regularly will also be able to use a supported version of the software for more information on your support entitlement visit the impact Resource Center last Poll for you today should be on your screen now when are you planning to perform your next upgrade are you in the process of upgrading um are you planning on upgrade in the next two months in the next two to four months 46 months next six months are are you not sure yet really appreciate the feedback here thanks folks like everyone got a chance to respond all right we've got some folks who are unsure of when they're next upgraded and most uh most everyone is uh planning an upgrade within the next two to six months that's great so a lot of this content today will be very valuable as you're starting to plan for your next upgrade thank you and now I'll pass it on to Adam to walk through the platform capabilities that can help with your upgrade all right ATF we're on ATF let's get going so we're going to start out with some Basics about ATF um and I call it ATF I apologize it is the automated test framework um and and you're going to hear me call it ATF all the time so ATF is built into the platform it's a free entitlement everybody has it and what it allows us to do is to run automated tests in the platform since it's built in the platform it has some advantages that a third-party product wouldn't have and we want to make sure that we're able to take advantage of those things when do we use ATF why do we use ATF so a few things that it does really well one is the functional testing of business logic so this allows us to test what we are what we're trying to do that we're able to test business rules or flows to test the outcomes we're we're trying to achieve really really good in browser compatibility testing what it allows you to do is to spin up a browser go to your instance and say run my automated tests and it's going to run using your browser which is awesome if I need to use Firefox or or Safari or Edge or Opera whatever it is you need to use with whatever plugins and security configuration you need to use we will run in your browser all the automated tests so you don't have to sit there and click on everything to do what needs to go on we're able to define the test here's the things we want to watch I launch my browser and hit go and then finally the area we really focus on with ATF and we have some some great stuff in Tokyo to help with this as well is regression testing and in regression testing we're not looking necessarily for it's broken or not broken but ATF is going to help us find is there's a change in Behavior we're going to focus in on change in Behavior to understand this is different before and after my upgrade and then we have to decide is that is the does the test need to be updated because this is a desired Behavior change or is there something wrong in my code and I need to update my code because I did not desire an update change a behavior change again regression testing helps us understand does it work the same as it did before and then it's going to be up to you to decide is that what I want or not a couple key things we want to think about when we build ATF tests one make a plan and this means lots of different things we're looking through our upgrade we want to make a plan um schmiel and I have done some other webinars we really focus in on the upgrade plan itself but in terms of ATF what we need to understand is is our test plan how detailed do we want the test to be what do we want to cover very important not on the technical side but who's going to maintain the tests like I said we're going to find differences in Behavior ideally very minimal but there will always be some because the as the upgrade as the platform changes as you change your code the behavior changes again summer desires some aren't but you need to make sure you know who is going to make the decision of is this a desired Behavior or not and if it's not who's going to update the test uh who's going to update the code if it is a desired Behavior who's going to update the test so I want you to make sure you think about who who's going to maintain the test who's going to decide you don't want to have you don't want to wait until the test finds an issue before you figure out who's going to address it plan plan plan next we have tests for outcomes when we are creating tests we don't need to test every widget along the way we test all the basic things do the form Fields work does it display correctly if I put a value in do I get a does it save the value all the basic stuff that we would have in a normal application a normal platform we of course test serve part of service now what you need to test are the outcomes you're trying to achieve so if I have a flow and I have these inputs and I'm expecting this output that's what you need to test is the output the outcome of what you get does it get assigned correctly does it prevent being does it prevent saving if this happens you don't need to test every little step along the way that just creates extra overhead for us with very very little return on it very related to that is going to be keeping it simple again we want to test what we need to test and not test other stuff we just because we can test it doesn't mean we need to test it or we want to test it we want to make sure that we run a test in the platform it's going to say pass or fail if it fails we're able to quickly identify what what's different what failed where it failed ATF will show us those test steps that failed but what does it mean how did it fail you want to make sure we're designing the test so that when it fails I know who I need to talk to and who's going to look at it if I have an overly complex test that tests many many different things it sounds good but when it breaks who do I talk who do I call right what do I do that goes back to making it a plan we want to make sure that when it when it fails I know who I'm going to call who's going to be able to make a decision quickly so that my upgrade time doesn't get delayed and the last one I put on here is execution time um we do a lot of stuff in ATF with the with the UI and you can interact in the UI and that's fine that's if that's what we're testing then we definitely want to use those UI steps our users use the UI but if we're not if we're doing setup um or we're trying to go through a couple quick things we want to make sure we're using server-side steps where we can to save time the UI takes longer in general because the data has to has to move to the browser it's got a render it's got to get all processed the JavaScript needs to be run there's just a lot of extra stuff we have to wait for it to happen if I can do it on the server side it's going to be a lot faster and the faster it is the more tests I can run it's all generally going to be better so make sure we're aware of what needs to be done in the UI what can be done on the server side so that I can optimize the server side optimize for performance time I can run more tests I can run more simpler tests that are testing all the different outcomes I'm looking for and then again I have my plan we cannot skip the plan part all right um and a little bit of background on how ATF works is one of the things that is is really important to understand is this General structure of ATF and that is that we have test Suites and test Suites uh we can have test Suites in test Suites so at what some point I can have a suite for an entire application I can have my upgrade Suite which has everything that I want to run at it at the lower level we have tests and tests are meant to be Atomic units so I have things like we have different test steps that come into it like creating a user if I'm using a third-party tool I have to understand what creating a user is we have an out of the box test step which allows me to create a user which simply says I want a user with this name I want to have this role I wanted to be in these groups creative so even a check box to say impersonate um we can reuse some data and there's some some times where we want to do that to just say pick a user that has this role but in a lot of things we want to do in the in the effort to be simple we're actually going to create a new user for every test I'm going to run and I'm going to give it just the specific role in testing so that way I don't have to worry about a user changing jobs which got which now they have different roles or there's some weird role combination we don't have to worry about it we're going to create users again very simple configuration we're going to put an ATF it's going to create the user impersonate it then it's going to do things it's going to open up a service portal it's going to submit a catalog item whatever whatever we need to do in the platform ATF can do it's going to run through all those tests test steps and then at the end it's going to unimpersonate it's going to go back to the normal user to the user that's running the test because it's gonna do all those things inside of the tests they're Atomic units they do not share data between them but inside of a test you can pass I create a user pass to the test step what the username is so I can create a record and a user's behalf or as that user inside we can share data but the tests are Atomic and that allows us to paralyze some things in uh in different ways or just be able to run one at a time and have it work the really key thing that I want to bring back is that the bottom of this which is rollback so it because this is built into the platform we understand what happened during the test and we're able to roll it all back so a few exceptions to this but generally whatever you do if I create a user or create an incident I escalate the incident I create a CI to be part of the incident it will undo all of those things so that I can run the same test again and I'm never hitting the residual effects of what that happened before so really really powerful um to help us uh if parallelism can still cause some some issues some tests can be run parallel some can't but generally we can run the same test over and over again fix something run it again fix something run it again and we never have to worry about um reading results from a previous run it's going to undo everything and roll it back and then it's going to save the results so that we can see what's going on we can we can make sure that everything look good if there are any issues we'll see what those issues are a nice feature as well is that for the UI test it'll take screenshots as it's going when there's any errors so that we can see what happened even though we've rolled back to all those records all right you got a very very quick intro into the automated test framework if you have more questions about this we run a platform Academy session every other week and we've done three or four um sessions on ATF um in the last year or so I think we have another one coming up in a couple more weeks um lots of great content that we'll talk about different things dealing with ATF outside of that there is awesome awesome in-depth training on now learning so I encourage you to do that uh to if you're going to be writing any tests you definitely want to take the training if you just want to learn a little bit more about it how to come up with a plan and what kind of tests I want to write the platform Academy sessions and the archives from those are incredibly valuable for you all right next I want to talk about one of the enhancements we got in Tokyo or with Tokyo it was actually this is actually supposed to come out in the next few days um very soon the ATF test generation and Cloud Runner ATS test generation Cloud Runner very creative names because they generate tests and they allow us to run those tests in the cloud and these are actually a little bit disconnected it's the same app in the store that you'll need to install but you the cloud Runner runs all ATF tests not just the test generated ones the the ATF test generator ones and the test generation doesn't have to be running the cloud you can run that like normal as well and we'll see this in a demo in just a second but what this allows us to do is to accelerate our testing because I can create tests faster than ever before before this we had quick start tests which were pre-defined testers six or seven hundred of those spanning the platform testing different things you were able to take one of the quick start tests modify it the way you needed to and then you for your for based on your customizations and your configuration and then you could run those tests now what we're able to do is or sorry we have the test Generations you also had um with the quick start ones you also have the ability to write your own from scratch which was needed if you were doing some any custom development or you just had a new workflow that was not covered in one of the quick start tests with test generation we're able to point um some AI at your instance at your data and it will fingerprint what your data looks like run a bunch of tests to recreate that data and then save those tests so that we get a a wide fingerprint of what works on my instance what are the current behaviors again this goes back to the regression test it fingerprints what what it does today and then we're actually going to jump to the next slide we fingerprint what we do today we upgrade our instance and then we're able to run those same tests to identify any changes in Behavior it will not say whether that is good or bad but it'll tell you there is a change in behavior and then you need to look at it again when I upgrade there are changes of behavior that I want that's why I'm upgrading we we fixed an issue where we enhance the process and there's changes in behavior that I don't want and I need to go fix it because it doesn't work the way it's supposed to in the past these we wouldn't have been able to cover this space a quick start test you would have had to create all these tests manually they're very time consuming to create they're very time consuming to to maintain what we're able to do now when I want to create an upgrade I create all my tests I upgrade I run my tests but I'm going to do my ex my next upgrade I'm going to throw my other ones away I'm going to create new tests that are based off of the data that are on my instance right now um and that that identify how it works today because there's virtually no cost to create them we just have to wait for them to create I don't have to pay somebody to create all these tests there's no problem with throwing them out when they get stale they will get stale as my data changes because these tests are looking at my data so right around my upgrade time I'm going to create new tests upgrade run those tests I can keep those tests for a little bit but then after that I'm going to throw them out and regenerate them because all I have to do is press a button to regenerate it and seeing is believing so we're going to go hop into a demo real quick and we are going to cover both test Generations what I've been talking about today and Cloud runner on how we run that um uh the question came in about ATF ATF has been around five or six years um it might have been Geneva or Helsinki when it came out maybe before then so everybody who supported every instance now out there has ATF it does get improvements um every release things get improved and in this case it's it's pretty major but um okay so we're gonna switch over to the demo okay I should be sharing my browser so if you don't see that then let me know it looks good all right so I am in ATF um you'll see lots and lots of options in ATF and again that's why I do recommend that you take a take a look through the academy sessions I'll walk you through some of these things and then the training lots and lots of great training about how to run ATF how to create tests a lot more detail than we can talk about in a couple minutes today we're going to be talking about test generation the new stuff so I'm going to come down the first thing I'm going to do is Select my cloud user so both the cloud Runner and test generation use um the servicenow servers but not on your instance and one of the things we need to do is to tell tell the configuration we're going to generate tests which user do we want to impersonate to generate the test this is who has access to the data so I'm generally going to pick sysadmin you'll notice I don't put a password in here we don't need a password there's there's not a security issue in here but we need to know which user do we want to impersonate who can see the data generally assist admin is going to be good but if I'm generating data that sysadmin can't see because we need to analyze the data you need to tell us which user you want to have and then you may need to change this depending which test you're generating so I picked this admin that's already who I have so I don't need to resubmit this but I just need to make sure that that user is has access to the data I want to generate otherwise it's going to be pretty simple testing if you have no data we have no tests okay now we're going to generate tests I'm gonna go to test generator when I go to the test generator this is one of my favorite demos it's incredibly boring I apologize for that but this is the form all we have to do is press submit and I will generate tests we'll go through a couple of the options but that's all I have to do the first thing is email and I want to point this out generally on a subprod and we're going to be running this we're always going to be generating tests on a subprod in a sub prod we generally have email turned off it's either going nowhere or it's going to some static account all the emails go in place this bypasses that because we know this is only used on a subprod and because we want to get this email this is going to be some other email address that this uses a different system so that it will go out even if email is turned off on this instance um so very important to have the next thing we have in here is Advanced you don't need to click Advanced but the options that are here are one which tables do we want to generate tests for default is all tables you can also specify specific table if I want to test just a specific table and then a couple options um I only I want less than uh 10 000 tests seems like a reasonable number and no more than 50 tests per table um again it's going to look at your data and it's going to generate the different permutations that it has these are the defaults that are in there they're reasonable to go with but you you can control them if you want that's it that's it and then all we're going to do is press submit I'm actually not going to press submit right now because I pressed it this morning generating test does need to analyze your data it is not instantaneous it can take a few hours it might run overnight might even take a couple days depending on how much data you have um so make sure that when you are planning your upgrade you do plan to generate those tests maybe a few days before uh maybe the weekend before we'll just kick it off on the subpro to generate those tests so that I can run it while I'm working on my upgrade um don't wait to the last minute because it does take a little bit of time I'm going to go click on more information it's going to show me what's running I have a few jobs that are running right now to create more tests in this case I can uh I kicked this off earlier and we're 33 done um but it's going to be generating those tests as we're going uh the overhead that it's looking at we are looking at your data it's a bit throttled so you're not you're most likely not going to notice any impact that is going on but it is working on this instance if your subprod is um busy for a lot of other things this is just running a couple jobs in the background I mean it should you should be able to continue doing work but uh understand that it is it is working on your system um okay so this is running it's been a day I've now have my tests what tests did I create I'm gonna go look at my test Suites and what we're going to see are some test Suites our test Suite that's created that is ATF generated Suite that all of them that they're created are there um and I will answer the some questions about availability of all this uh once we wrap up the demo here so it created a test suite for me called ATF generated Suite it's very creative um and then these are these are the tests so on my demo instance with very little data and just zbooted demo instance it generated 86 tests for me um looks like one per table um and that's because it's a very boring data set you're going to see more again we put those thresholds in there so it doesn't generate too much but it's looking at the most common data in your instances looking at the data in those tables to generate what's going on when I go look at one of these we're going to go click on this uh one of these tests one of the things I talked about earlier was keeping it simple not testing everything well that's true because I don't want you to spend your time creating a bunch of tests and going through because these are generated by a computer and we're going to throw them away we're not going to have to maintain them we're just going to create them use them and throw them away I don't care how detailed it is detailed is okay so in this case what we're seeing is that it is impersonating a user it's not going to create a user as part of the test because we're looking at real data so there is a real user to use it's going to impersonate that user open a form set some fields um validate but they're there set some Fields validate they're there save it it's going to submit it record um check that the record was saved it's going to do all these things again fingerprinting what works today to get the data that's in there when it generates the test it goes through lots of different permutations looking at your data it creates the tests and then they do have to pass they do have to work and then it's only going to save the ones that work so if it can't actually recreate the data that you have in your data because there's something else going on it won't save those ones it's going to save the things that it can recreate and it knows do work that way when you upgrade because it worked before it needs to work again so we've created those things now let's get to the Cloud runner part of this so when I get to the Cloud Runner well before Cloud Runner if I want to run this I click on run tests and I have start new test Runner so a test Runner still important there's still things that we're going to use these allow us to run in the browser configuration that you have so if I need to run in Safari I can run Safari if I need to run Chrome with a very very specific set of extensions turned on I could run that with with the new test Runner and spin it up and if I do that um we're going to keep talking I'm going to go ahead and run this test I didn't have a test Runner spun up so it's going to spin up a new browser on my on my computer a note I can't really do anything else with this instance right now while this is running because it's impersonating sysadmin I wasn't logged in as this admin it impersonated sysadmin it's currently running assist admin and it's going to go through those tests it's going to set the fields validate that there run through everything it needs to run um again if I need to do browser compatibility testing I need to do this this is still valuable but I don't really want to sit here and do that um if we come back we're actually seeing it run in the background so this instance we spin up the test Runner is now commuting direct communicating directly with the instance going back and forth and we'll track the progress here Cloud Runner allows me to say Don't run this on my instance run it and servicenow's Cloud so it's going to run to servicenow's Cloud now I believe that's running Chrome um so it's not great browser compatibility test it's not using your plugins it's not using your security stuff we're using pretty default browsers to make make sure things work that's going to cover a lot of your use cases but not all your browser compatibility use cases that you might need to cover so in this case it's running and again it's it's running you were seeing it type those values in if you see the screen blink that's because it's taking screenshots along the way again really useful part of ATF but not super useful for me right now I don't actually want to sit here and run and run while this works um since I fired this off we are going to wait and I'm going to answer a couple questions while we see it complete a couple of the questions that came in is the cloud Runner available in the store now no it's not available in the store now it will be it's planned to be released in the November release which is on Thursday in two days um so check back then it does require Tokyo there's some enhancements to the platform to make this work it is a store app but it requires Tokyo to work so this is not going to help you upgrade to Tokyo but it's going to help you upgrade past Tokyo going to Utah going to patch releases or any custom uh deploys you have along the way um okay yeah this is only available in Tokyo um and it is not available in GCC yet um this is available for the commercial customers but not in GCC uh because it does use some shared stuff um that we are planning to to get it uh run in there but there will be a delay to get it available to GCC you can still run everything with your test uh the test Runner with yeah with your normal test runner for ATF you can still use ATF and test Runner uh in GCC or any of the regulated markets but you can't run it you can't use test generation and you can't use cloud Runner uh in the regulated markets yet so this is still running see if it gives us a quick one almost done and hopefully that'll be the end of it so we run 16 out of 16 steps and now this test Runner actually is still usable it's just sitting here waiting for other tests but we are done so we can go to the results and when I see the result it's going to show me that we did all these steps they were all successful there's some logging along the way about what it did really useful again if it failed it would tell me where it failed and then I'd be able to manually recreate these things to go what's going on here okay so that was uh using a test Runner if I want to use the cloud Runner I'm going to run the same thing and we're going to go into history and go to my test and when I go to Cloud Runner I love love boring demos I just click Cloud Runner and click run test I'm not actually configured to a cloud Runner so it's going to be waiting for cloud Runner resources to come online and definitely but that's all we have to do and it will run in the background this allows me to schedule it whenever I want to schedule it let it run as long as I want to let it run it's just going to go and give me the results all I have to do is view the results I don't have to sit here and wait um it does take time but I am able to do all the other work that I want to do and I can let it run overnight just come in the morning and review my my test results so I'm going to go ahead and cancel these again because it's this instance isn't configured yet and I've canceled it all right so we have gone over test generation and the cloud Runner both very boring um make sure you're on Tokyo pretty soon you'll be able to get these from the store and then you'll be able to generate tests and run them in the cloud very simply no extra configuration nothing else to support just a couple clicks and your life is easier all right did we get all the questions I think so so we're going to go ahead and move on all right so we did our demo and now let's get talk about instant scan so ATF allows us to do uh Dynamic code analysis we're actually running the code we're actually executing it making sure everything works instant scan takes a different approach instascan allows us to do static code analysis so why do we use instant scan so instant scan allows us to identify issues with what we're doing or warning signs if something's a little bit off it allows us to ensure we have best practices being enforced we all should be doing some type of code review for any update sets we're pushing through any apps we're going through this allows us to codify the best practices the code reviews that we do manually we can just write checks for those so it does it for us really simplifying our time reducing the amount of human error that can be introduced reducing the time it takes and making sure we have better coverage with less effort and also better quality and then it allows us to uphold quality standards this is how we do things here we want to make sure it works there's a few different types of instant scan checks that we can run the most common one is a table check and a table check is where we look at a table for certain conditions and any record that has these conditions we're going to flag it and have us come look at it we can also run column checks a little bit less a little bit less frequent and where we're looking for certain types and if I'm looking at an XML field in HTML field I want to check all my HTML fields to make sure they don't do this whatever that whatever that may be the next one is script only table checks are the most common script or probably the second most and then column checks script only allow us to run a script and we can find errors however we want to find them look for conditions that we however we want to find them and then flag those things and then linting is standard linting for code to check the syntax of your JavaScript they're all useful we're going to do a demo in just a minute we're going to write our own table check but this allows us to check different things different ways to find issues with the configuration itself we're not running the code but we're examining the code it gives us a different way to look at the quality of our code and ensure we don't have any issues the less the fewer issues we have the user upgrades are going to be just very quickly when we look at this the structure for instance scan is very similar to ATF where we have Suites that can have sweets the difference being that eight ATF has tests we have tests to go into Suites to go into Suites for instance scan we have checks that go into Suites that go into Suites so I can have a suite that just checks all my script includes or I can have a suite that checks all my HTML fields or I can have a suite that checks everything whatever makes sense is what is what we want to set up and again what this allows us to introduce is another level of quality control so we develop them we develop our our workflows our customizations however we want to do that this allows us to validate that what we configured conform to our standards and then we move on to testing with ATF very complementary between instant scanner ATF it is not a one or the other we want to be using both and with that let's go ahead and get into a quick demo all right so we went through ATF and now we are over to instant scan out of the box everybody should have the instant security Center definitions that come through you'll see more definitions coming through in in other releases mostly through the store we're starting to ship them both Standalone and ship them with um with the applications that they go with many of these are not um application specific um so they can be but they're not they don't have to be application specific um we will be shipping more of these come through but I don't want you to wait for us if you have things that you're looking for in a code review you can write checks to do those things today so if we come in this one's not modifiable we're just going to bring one up to take a look at it because this is for instance security Center again this is running on all your instances today it is how is what powers the instant security Center and you can use it to power your own um your own analysis as well so we're going to look at again lots of table checks how about [Music] um table access for all internal users so if I look at table access for all internal users what this is looking at this is a a complicated example but a great example that comes through we have a name a simple name what am I looking at uh category there's a few different categories which we'll go over when we create one of these and a priority so what type of issue is this and how important is this issue we ship those for the ones we write but you can set those as well or there are minor issues that you probably shouldn't do but aren't going to stop things to a major security issue where we're going to stop this right away we're not deploying this code while we have this issue short description explains a little bit more about what we're talking about the description we really do want to describe what are we looking for and why is it a problem and then the resolution how do you fix it it's important to know how do we fix it not just I don't like it but don't do this do this instead and documentation so this documentation can go to servicenow documentation it could go to a KB article it could go to uh training if you see this you need to go do this training to an internal KB whatever makes sense you can link to that documentation to help the person who finds this fix it and then what we do in this is we are looking at a certain table we're querying that table with this condition for every row we get back we are then going to run this script which checks more things and then anything that returns back um in the code we're going to say flag This Record if I go back to a little bit more to a simpler one so there's a table check I'm going to go to this other record there's no advanced stuff a lot of things we can look for we don't need to run any script in this case we're just saying any record in this table that comes back with this condition has this issue and we should fix it right in this case this was a moderate the other one was a was a high lots of great information to come through but let's go and create one and run run real quick so I'm going to come into checks and we're going to create a new check so we're going to create new what are we going to check for okay so we have again those four types table column script and linter table again very common very useful very easy all right so we're going to check for atoms it takes longer to come up than to write great check for atoms uh a security issue definitely a security issue not critical but High um I'm going to skip the description and resolution I shouldn't but I will and no documentation uh table so the table we're going to look for is just user so assist user and then the condition first name is Adam okay uh no advances so we're looking at any atom is a problem and we're going to go ahead and save this you may choose to use other things but I'm going to go with this and we're going to test it so we're going to run the test check it's going to run it this is again this says demo data so there's not a lot of things to come through ah but it found something so it ran this very quickly it's just got to run the query if we have scripts it's got to run the scripts too so it can take longer some of these checks do take longer than other ones this case very simple and what do we find if we go into the result so there's only one atom and has a record it has a a link to that record that's really important because we don't want to just say you have lots of problems we're going to go which work where's the problem where is it so in this case we find that I'm the problem um and I can create a task to go hey let's go resolve this I can have this run once a week I'm gonna run once a day go through my Suites and figure out do we have any issues now this can be for things that are a little bit more serious that hey do we find bad references that have come through um you know if I'm doing all my all my work in the UI it's good there's a lot of protection to make sure we don't have bad data but if I am using some apis if I'm loading an update set so I'm doing XML loads there's chances where things get off this allows us to find some of those things so some cases we do want to um we want to run these in production these are not always sub prods only but we're definitely a Roman subprod some things we're going to run in prod we're going to check for some bad data we're going to check a lot of things in CIS metadata again we want to try and automate our code reviews so that all we're doing is reviewing these issues not looking for the issues not clicking through record and record and record okay instant scans available to everybody it's on all your instances it's ready to go um I think we talked about what's through here we have a finding we have the checks that we ran if I ran a suite it would list the different checks um lots of great information in here if you have more questions about this you can also go we have an instant scan session in the platform Academy and there is training as well and now learning um uh there's a question about muting once I find this issue can I say don't tell me about this one again and I don't think that's in here right now I know that's something that's been discussed um but I don't think we have that here today um I would have to look a little bit more it's a great question if you want to post it in the community we can get to the I can confirm that um that that it's coming in but generally it's going to find all the issues um and you also you could if you're writing your own checks you could exclude things in there if you wanted to do that okay uh so let's get back to our deck really quickly all right so we have talked about ATF we've talked about instant scan okay Shameless plug so I I work on all the platform and we're talking about ATF instance scan and upgrade plans well you want smoother upgrades here is a secret we also want to make sure we're using low code tools when we can that means decision Builder process automation designer flow designer action designer and automation engine when you write lots of code you write lots of script includes and lots of beautiful JavaScript it's beautiful I appreciate it but it does introduce risks it's harder to test it's harder to understand what it's doing and it puts more of a testing burner on burden on you because I don't know what your code does when you use the low code tools we're able to test all the out-of-the-box actions we're able to test the logging and flow designer that the the performance of everything that goes through you put more of that testing burner burden on service now where it should be and all you're doing is configuration you're just putting in if I I'm going to give it a username and I want you to create it I don't have to write a script to do it there's less for you to maintain there's less for you to write in the first place and there's less for you to test it's going to be better for you in the long run and often in the short run to take advantage of the low code tools we don't have time to talk about them but make sure you know what all of these are decision Builders only been around for a few releases across the automation designer a few releases before that photo designer has been around for years now with the action designer an automation engine includes integration Hub and RPA robotic process automation so even if you don't have an API you can still use our tools to interact with something you really really want to make sure you understand what's there how do you use these things it's going to make your upgrade easier right it's going to make your life easier in a lot of ways okay and next um as an update in Tokyo in the Tokyo time frame um decision Builder if you haven't seen this make sure you go see some of the academy sessions some of these webinars on there a lot of great stuff in the the developer Advocates material in here there's a lot of things out here in Tokyo we added the ability to interact to Import and Export into Excel or export and import into Excel with decisions decisions allow us to get rid of code that would be a big if statement a big switch statement and make it a table and service now prior to Tokyo you had to have a table in service now and you still do but now you can export that to Excel and I can now this is one of my favorite things give an analyst an Excel file and say fill in all the choices so I can have multiple inputs and multiple outputs they can fill out a table with everything if you get these things I want you to get this this is the result if you put in a give me B if you put in C give me B if you give me e give me d whatever it is I don't care I just know these are the inputs and these are the outputs you give me the Excel file back I load it back in with a push of a button and now my flow my decision my flow my process just says make a decision it calls your logic your decision table and comes out with the result so I have less I don't have to modify my flow just because we need to modify a few variables it's awesome and it allows us to make to empower more people in our organization so I don't have to have a pro coder updating an if statement updating a switch for a minor change every other week I can just now do that with a decision I can give that analyst the ability to do it in the platform or we can do it in Excel if that's where they want to live all right next thing we're going to look at are upgrade plans um we've got a couple minutes to go through this so upgrade plans allow us to make that last mile a little bit sooner or a little bit easier so when I perform an upgrade we are still going to have a larger plan um about when are we going to do the upgrade what are we going to upgrade um lots of things to do how we're going to communicate that but the upgrade plans are very specific in the instance as an admin when I go to perform an upgrade I perform the upgrade and then I need to review an upgrade Center what are the different what are the different things that happened uh what skips are there I want to install this I want to do the upgrade I want to make sure I activate these two plugins install this app ignore ignore these issues and accept these skips I had to just document that in the change before this is what I want to have to do one time consuming for me to do um I have to do it on every subprod as I go along the way if I have two subprods in a prod not a huge deal but it still had the chance for me to get it wrong uh it it and I will do it right if humans have to do it we're going to get some things wrong I don't want to take that risk and I want to take that time upgrade plans allow us to record that upgrade an instance record it say this is what I want to do verify this is my plan push it to the app repo and then all my other instances can pull it down and apply it so it's faster to do less error Chrome and let's just go see a quick demo of that as well so we're going to switch over to our upgrade plans so our upgrade plans I'm going to come into the upgrade center and upgrade Center I'm going to see a module for upgrade plan um before we do that I want to come down well let's let's just go to upgrade plan so I can click on upgrade plan here or I'm going to manage the upgrade plan okay okay ruin my parade okay so in the upgrade plan the thing that I want to make sure that you uh let's see if I can switch this back I think I screwed this up um when you come into your instance it's not going to say Builder it's going to say consumer by default all instances are consumers so we talked about building a plan and then uh retrieving it and consuming it and applying it that's a consumer Again by default all instances are consumer you're going to pick one subrod and make it a builder so if I go into properties for upgrade Center I'm going to change it from consumer to Builder one time you can't undo this once you've built a plan um so make sure you know what you're going to do unless you're if you zboot it you you can if you clone over it you can but without a clone once this is set as a builder it's going to be a builder so I've already configured it to Builder if I go into upgrade plans what happens is I have build if you have consume it's going to say retrieve so we're going to come in here I've set it to Builder I go to my upgrade plans and now I'm going to click build and what this is going to do is it's going to look at what I've done since my upgrade and it's going to assemble that into an upgrade plan in this case it's a very clean instance and I didn't do anything so building a plan is is pretty pretty quick so now let's see if we view the details um again I have a demo instance so it has a few issues you shouldn't see these things but I'm not connected to an app repo which is going to cause me a problem since we need to publish these to that repos now I'm going to go to the upgrade plan and my upgrade plan is blank because again I didn't do anything but here we're going to see that it's going to look at what you did but we're going to be able to say hey I want to activate this plugin actually this plugin install this application and it's going to go through everything that I needed to do and all the different customizations that have they're there once that's there I'm going to publish it again it's not going to work for me today but I'm going to publish this shouldn't work for me today um there we go uh I'm gonna publish that to my app repo there will be now be an app in my app repo called upgrade plan Tokyo patch 2. I can go to any of my other instances and retrieve upgrade plan for Tokyo patch 2. simple easy consistent but now I have less places that I can screw it up I can review what we're going to do and I can be I can rest assured it's gonna happen all right and with that we're going to go back to the deck real quick we've got just a few minutes left here so I'll just go quickly through some resources and the links will be in the chat so be sure to copy and save those you can also check out the community post for the recording for today's session and grab any links that you might have missed so if you haven't already got your now platform Tokyo release upgrade kit it's now available the upgrade kit contains a playlist of valuable links demos and more to help you get everything you need to upgrade it's available on both PDF and PowerPoint so that you can customize the presentation and you can get the upgrade kit by visiting the upgrade easily page on the customer success Center there should be a link in the chat for you and today's conversation does not end here please do join us on the servicenow releases and upgrades Community to ask questions and get answers you can also learn about upcoming webinars and meetups get the latest best practices get expert resources and connect with peers I highly suggest you subscribe to The Forum to receive notifications about popular posts and upcoming events and pro tip you can customize your notifications to only get notified about what matters most to you another thing I wanted to call out is the now create upgrade methodology you can get step-by-step guidance on upgrading your instance and each step includes a full list of resources and assets that you can use and if you already have a strong upgrade plan in place we suggest cross-referencing it with a now create upgrade methodology as Adam mentioned before we've got a bunch of events happening um either through live on servicenow or integrated event series to support upgrades and adoption and deployment of servicenow products or there's the bi-weekly platform Academy series again the links are in the chat I do want to call out some upcoming events that we have this month all around upgrades and what's new from servicenow so we have a session next week about planning and managing your upgrades on now support we also have a webinar on the 15th which will give you a look into the November store release and all those new features um as well as on November 17th or the 16th for our folks in apj we have build a streamlined project plan for upgrade success so we hope to see you at a future event the link should be in the chat to register and we've got all these other resources that you can check out I believe we've only got a couple minutes here Adam was there any questions that you wanted to answer before we log off today yeah there were a couple questions so one the muting um sorry I wasn't sure that it was the second that I was in here um the on any specific finding for instance can you can mute it um which will say don't tell me about this again um and then you can get I believe you can go unmute it when you do mute it it'll ask you for a reason um muting is a bit you know concerning when you go through it because you don't want to forget something that's there but you can mute it and you can still review those things it's just not going to alert you to them again so that's important to to know that you can do that if you want to which is important for something like instance instant security Center where you can't change the checks for your checks you can do whatever you want to do for these ones though you can mute it to go I don't need to know about this for for some reason which does happen um and then there was one more question can upgrade plans be used on monthly patches absolutely right so everything we're talking about with ATF instant scan and upgrade plans they're not just for major upgrades they're for everything right so whether I'm deploying a change I have a new custom app whether I'm doing a uh just a minor upgrade from a patch release from the store or adding a new um a new app in the store use upgrade plans use instant scan use update uh upgrade plans ATF and instant scan right they're all going to be make your life easier and the more you use them the easier they get to use the better your plan the more mature it gets and that it's going to make those family upgrades even easier when we just look at an upgrade once a year um right we have to have Grooms a year if we're afraid of it and we just do it then it's really hard um but the more you get into it about using these tools every time your life's going to be easier you're going to sleep a lot more soundly um every night because you know these things are going to work thank you Adam and thank you all for being here with if we didn't get a chance to get to get to your question I do apologize um but feel free to ask your questions um in that link that we shared in the chat that will have the recording we'll be looking out there if there are any other follow-up questions come up but thank you all for joining us thank you Adam for those incredible demos have a wonderful rest of your day