all right welcome everyone thanks for joining it looks like we have a truly cosmetol and crowd here again like we often do so it's great to see everybody coming in at different times of the day and night to join our webinar so thank you for joining and we're going to go ahead and get started so today we're going to talk about getting ready to upgrade to the Washington DC release and to set expectations this webinar is about how to do upgrades and um you know best practices and that sort of thing we're not going to be covering new features in the Washington DC release so if you thought that's what this webinar was about um you can still you're welcome to hang on but um just to let you know that's not what we're covering today and also we Al always have to make our Safe Harbor notice here if there are any forward-looking statements made during this webinar they are not promises or guarantees of future features or functionalities all right so now that we got that out of the way let's take a quick look at the agenda here so of course of course we'll be do some introductions so you can get to know the panel that will be speaking today I'll review the upgrade policy and uh help you understand upgrade entitlements and how to manage upgrades and then we'll learn some leading practices we'll lean in to find some great tips for successful upgrades from someone who's been out in the field and then we have some demos of some uh features in the platform that can help you with your upgrades and of course we won't leave you without some resources and tools that can help you with your upgrade and then we'll move into Q&A and I really encourage you if you have questions to go ahead and post those in the Q&A and please don't put those in the chat because we will manage the Q&A throughout the webinar um and answer questions if we can uh right away and save the other ones for the end um and if we put them in the chat sometimes they kind of get garbled and we don't get around we we miss some of them so please make sure that you put those in the Q&A tool so thanks for that all right so let's get started and meet our speaker ERS my name's bre Koke and I'll be your host today I've been with service now for about 14 and a half years and prior to that was a service now customer admin and I'm in a marketing role where we work on creating post sales content to help customers with adoptions um so that's why I'm here today to bring that experience to you and our next guest is Dale do you want to take a moment to introduce yourself sure I'm I work as a principal product success manager within the Creator workflows uh dealing with kind of uh really large implementations of app engine studio app engine management center and just general content development studio all right thanks and uh Paige how about you hey BR uh real quick I don't think we can see your jack before well while I'm introducing myself um so I am Paige stuffy uh I also am a product success manager like Dale and do very similar things um been in the ecosystem for about 13 years primarily as a customer until about a year and a half ago when I joined service now all right so that's our panel can everybody see the deck now yep all right sorry about that um okay so the first thing we want to tackle today is a little bit about the upgrades and how to stay in compliance with our upgrade policy so at service now we have what we call an N minus two compliance and so what that means is that you don't want to be any more than two releases behind so how that works is um as soon as Washington goes generally available in March that will be considered our n release and then at that point Vancouver becomes n minus one and Utah is n minus two and then Tokyo is n minus 3 which means it's at end of life and we want to get you off of that um version as quickly as possible because when you are on an instance that is no longer supported um obviously we can still provide you with some technical support but there will be no further app patches or um hot fixes to that um there's no service level agreements um associated with it and we don't take any liability for any issues that might happen including security issues and then last but not least um you could be forced into an emergency upgrade because there's some kind of um security breach that we need to take care of immediately so that's probably not a place you want to be in and today we're going to talk about how to do the upgrade so hopefully you don't have to worry about being there um so before we go get into our content I have a poll here for you and this is you know what release are you currently on um so we can kind of get a feel for where you are um if you're on Tokyo Utah Vancouver Washington or maybe you're not sure and I I hope there's nobody in that last section but um you never know so it looks like uh Utah's trending here pretty well um glad to see that the Tokyo is very much the minority so most of you don't look like you'll be uh going into the end of life and it looks like we have an early adopter person who has early available access and is already on Washington DC so we'll just let that run for another couple seconds here um because it looks like we've gotten most of the folks have responded so just another second or two here to get your responses in there all right so let's um looks like our majority here is in Utah with Vancouver running a close second so glad you're all here and that um you're going to learn how to um get into the right version all right so let me get started here with the first topic which is understanding managing and planning your upgrades so first I want to kind of explain our release process most of you may know that we have family releases that come out on the first and third quarter of the year and those are are releases that have the city names and obviously we're getting near the end of the alphabet so I'm not really sure what's happening after Z but um we'll see what happens um and then those releases they all get monthly patches that will come out uh to keep them up to date and you know add things as they're going along and then we have the other release types which are um the end of life upgrades for instance so if you are on Tokyo release we would put you into what's called our end of Life program I know it sounds kind of scary um to get you um upgrad to a current release and then we also have other patches security updates and hot fixes that'll come out periodically and then last but not least we do also have store releases and those are released to our service now store and uh just like the app store for um Apple you know we have applications out there that are written by people in our ecosystem as well as our own and so you can filter out to see the service now only apps that are out there and some of those are upgraded um on a quarterly basis and then sometimes they're rolled into a family re and and sometimes not so if you're interested in a store app just make sure you read it carefully so you know exactly what you're getting into with that all right um so let's talk about some upgrade resources that are available to you and the first thing I want to talk about is the upgrade Center that's in your instance that you can manage yourself and as you see here from the screenshot from product docs you can go into product docs and learn a lot about the upgrade Center and what's entailed and that and we also have some YouTube videos available as well on our YouTube channel so the upgrade Center consists of three major pieces and that would be the upgrade plans the upgrade previews and the upgrade monitor so the upgrade plan is where you can record all the steps that you would normally do manually after an upgrade for instance installing plugins or update sets or resetting an integration or something like that you record that and then you just replay that and those updates are um done automatically for you and why is this helpful because many of you have probably been using a checklist in the past and you're saying well that's working pretty good well I was with a customer once and we had the checklist and the checklist was great but the uh admin forgot to do the very first step and we spent a whole day on a conference call unfortunately which happened to be Mother's Day uh troubleshooting the issue and then at the end of the day we figured out that he had just forgotten the first step so using the upgrade plan can help you avoid situations like that the the next piece is is the upgrade preview which paig will talk a lot about later on and it's also a really powerful tool that will help you preview what will happen when an upgrade is applied to your instance and so you can figure out what conflicts or issues might come up and what REM mediation that you would want to make prior to taking the upgrad so there's no surprises or gotchas and then last but not least there's the upgrade Monitor and I call this the the Santa tracker for your service now upgrade so it's going to show you the progress of your upgrade um live as it's happening so there's just three major parts of the upgrade Center that you would want to be aware of and you can obviously go into product docs and read more about those the other place where we have a lot of resources available to you is right in now support so when you log in with your admin credentials you'll be able to navigate to the instances and see the list of instances associated with your organization and you'll see the status of this what um version it's on if it's in any kind of end of Life program if there's changes scheduled for it and you can also use the actions button there to the right if you want to schedule an immediate upgrade or patch um that's you want to hop in there and then if you drill into the instance individually you can see really detailed instant information about that instance such as um the IP address what plugins are installed um and if there and more detail about the changes that are scheduled for that instance so that's right there in now support um and so another thing I want to explain that um I hope will be helpful is about our upgrade and patching timeline um so service now has instituted scheduled patches and upgrades and so if you go out there to self- schedu a patch upgrade you may find that one's already been scheduled and you be like how did that happen well that's because we're doing it automatically um because we have these patches that come out on the first month of a quarter and then there's um hot fixes or other um security fixes that'll come out that are associated with that patch so you might have Vancouver patch 4 come out in January and then in February you would have Vancouver patch 4 hxs 2 a 2B Etc um so that's what's happening there and we try to Autos schedu I shouldn't say try we do automatically schedule those for you and the thing about service now schedule changes is that you are not able to cancel those um you should be able to reschedule them in most instances but we're not able to allow you to reschedule those or uh cancel those sorry um and then also in those scheduled changes you may find if you are at that end of life situation that we will schedule an upgrade for you and in that situation we'll give you 90 days to prepare for that upgrade before it gets applied and then um obviously we only apply that to your sub prds and then you have 14 days to review on your sub prds and make any remediations that you need to do before you take the final upgrade um so that's a little bit of overview of how those prescheduled changes work and sometimes you may find that you're in more than one of those prescheduled changes programs at once or you may find that um because we do based that on the uh version that you're on at the time those changes are scheduled you may find you're not in the programs that you thought you were so just take a look at that and evaluate that before you have a panic attack on any of that um because we're really trying to make it easier for you so that you can manage those um you don't have to go in there and manage all those upgrades yourself all right so let's talk a little bit about um if you're self- scheduling upgrades which is obviously your preference right because you're running a business or an organization and you may have specific times of the year that aren't good for you and so it's always best to schedule these upgrades on your own terms and have your plan in place and do your preparation so if this is on the now support portal you can go in here and you can schedule the changes and you can see the different um options that are available that you need to look at now when you do a self- scheduled change you can cancel those and you can normally reschedule those or retarget those um the only thing is that you'll need to do that at least two hours before that scheduled change is going to occur um and if you schedule a self- change that brings you up to a more current patch or more current version the automated changes will be automatically deleted um so that um you you know because you've already superseded those you don't need those anymore so the system already allows for that so it's really a pretty cool system with a lot of automation built into it and I promise I'm not going to be talking forever as I feel like I am um so one other thing when you're managing the upgrades um we have a few common questions that come up and sometimes people are like well the rescheduling is not available for me and because we do have this very complex change calendar with a complect detection um you know there are certain times when rescheduling is not available because there's just not a time available for you to do that or it may be some kind of an emergency patch that it's non-negotiable um another common question that we have are maybe some certain times are unavailable and as you know you know we have all these instances in a Data Center and there's obviously activities going on in that data center that are both service now related or customer related and so again that conflict detector will only schedule times where it's good availability for those changes to occur so if a time isn't available for you um we can't make an allowance to change that because obviously one person changing could set off a whole chain of reaction of other changes getting out of whack um so you know you just have to try to choose another schedule another time that is closest to the one that you wanted and last but not least um if you put in your change for a patch upgrade or an upgrade um and you have questions or you need to adjust it in some way um normally you might think oh I need to log an now support ticket but in this case because you've logged a change and because we have a specialized team that manages those changes we ask that you make any of those updates in the change record directly and do not open a case because the regular support team isn't as well versed and all the things that the change team are and so it will actually take longer for you to get your situation resolved if you log the now support ticket as opposed to just putting that right in your change ticket or yeah okay so we got through all of that hopefully that was um a little more clear than mud um if not you can go to our community to get more information or um you can go to the now support portal and get more information there as well and as you're doing the poll I'll kind of explain you can go to troubleshooting and support on an now support portal and you can find information about upgrades there as well as our known error portal so you can also um check that out and make sure that there aren't any known errors that are going to affect you when you go to take a release so let's watch these poll results start coming in here real quick while everyone's answering the poll I did want to clarify one point um our slides and there were several questions that came in around um what versions We support whether that's in minus two or in minus one um I think some of the slides say in minus two and reference in minus three the policy is actually in minus one now um that has changed and that's that's probably probably why it's a little confusing uh but I did provide a link to an KB article out on support that um that's spells that out pretty clearly so it is in minus one all right thank you Paige all right we've got about 73 people in 73% so it looks like everybody's W in on the poll so it looks like the we upgrade once a year looks like the most popular followed by close by General availability and waiting for a specific patch um couple people unsh sure and a few in the early availability program and another thing you can do when you're on the now support portal we have a service catalog out there called the automation Center and that's where you can sign up if you want to be in the early availability program where you will get access to our most recent release a month before it goes into General availability all right so I'm going to go ahead and end that poll and we're going to go to our next speaker which is Dale dunkerly um thank you for joining us Dale hi um he's going to talk to us about leading practices so take it away Dale sure uh well we're really gonna kind of talk about kind of serviceing out governance right and governance is a interesting topic because I know most or Enterprise organizations have them and is really just the backbone of an organization providing a solid framework for kind of decision making and basically aligning to the organization's Mission and strategic objectives it's all about establishing rules processes and structures for an effective management and control of them one of the most and coolest things that governance does is create a structure that outlines responsibilities roles and relationships among the key stakeholders as well this way everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing and who's in charge but and it promotes a transparency and accountability and clear line of authority within all of it but governance isn't all about telling people what to do it also helps manage risks by identifying and assessing potential obstacles that get in the way of organizational objectives but implementing risk management Frameworks um and processes governance also ensures everyone's on the same page and works together to protect the organization's interests another big part of governance is making sure everyone follows the rules is in compliance with laws regulations industry standards and is crucial to maintain maining stakeholders trust and minimizing any legal consequences governance also informs everyone of legal requirements and insures adherence by implementing those policies and procedures that are very important yeah um you make a really compelling argument for governance and I like how you break it down into the the different boards there um yeah so what are how how is this not all about just procedures and rules because you did say there was a lot of procedures and rules associated with this well that's a good question right governance usually kind of comes up with the policies and processes that everybody likes to work with but it also oversees things like resource allocations and things like budget budgeting management and any Financial processes are required within the particular areas that need them this ensures that everyone's got the resources efficiently and effectively to support the organization strategic goals and another part of it is stakeholder engagement the establish mechanism for involving those stakeholders in the decisions themselves fostering those relationships and considering any diverse perspectives that everybody might have and their priorities this way everyone feels heard and valued and last governance monitors and evaluates upgrade performance by implementing mechanisms to measure progress Track Performance indicators and also conduct regular assessments this enables informed decision- making and a and drive success organizational success in a nutshell governance provides a good framework for decision- making managing risks ensuring compliance and over seeing resource allocation as well as engaging the stakeholders while looking at the organizational performance so it's a pretty tough job ultimately and really what you want to be doing is trying to find that effective management to achieve what you need to have with any type of either project or upgrade 100% And I think you know that stakeholder involvement is so critical and sometimes people think they can skip that um because it'll go faster but it usually ends up taking longer if they do that without a doubt you really you really do struggle with it right um if you don't have the right people at the right time essentially you do have a bit of a struggle to kind of get everybody involved uh and if you involve people too late you you do get that kind of well why wasn't I here and why wasn't I involed can't tell you how many times we've had that type of conversation but you know there's other kind of challenges that come with it right budgetary constraints as I was talking about earlier um but we need to prioritize the funding the managing of the costs because let's face it a lot of customers do upgrades not just by themselves but with partners and with other Finance so they need that financial support from the governance that they have but technical cap compatibility should I say integration can also pose hurdles during upgrades but governance will get that covered as well but overseeing those technical assessments and coordinating collaboration between all of the different areas and some effective project management governance helps to address any comp compatibility issues and hopefully minimum as much disruption as possible I mean other things that they try to look after is data migration that's generally across everybody and can be complex tasks during upgrades but government does make it easier by facilitating those data migration strategies or even other data management protocols or and ensuring comprehensive testing and validation will make sure you have the correct data Integrity stakeholder alignment and communication are critical for these particular um upgrades and governance ensures that everyone is on the same page and establishing really good effective communication channels and providing regular updates to those stakeholders um to provote promote that collaboration then try and smooth out that upgrade process as best as possible yeah oh so much to think about right um it is and then of course you know everybody's always thinking about risks with upgrades because you know how do you manage that well upgrades do introduce potential risks there's no two ways around it right ultimately you're upgrading entire platforms and sometimes entire structures inside plugins and inside different table areas but governance in general at a high level ensur that risk management and any security measures are in place throughout that process where they can take on risk assessments do some security protocols do some vulnerability monitoring but some governance safeguards for the organizational assets that are key to the platforms operational you know they can really look after what is essential to be working on the platform to make sure that everything is working for everybody I mean hopefully you can see now how governance is essential for managing the those complex upgrades and addressing any resistance to change or having budgetary constraints that they need to be navigated or technical capabilities or data management you know stakeholder management and communication again I will I'll reiterate it's key to all of that uh to make sure that everybody's happy and ensuring that risk management you know it's vital uh governance helps organizations to do that regularly yeah and I know a lot of companies are like well I don't have time to do government I don't have time to document these things but my response would be you don't have time not to um even the littlest amount of governance is key to all of this right you need to make sure that you are of running some sort of level of governance across your platform if even if you've got sort of one level of kind of um how do I put this one plugin one area that you're doing um it's needed but the minute you go to more than one say you've got itm HR CSM even if you've got more than one you can definitely work with that and planning and preparing those upgrades can be complex but governance will make that easier with governance you know everybody knows the real roles and responsibilities and how the decisions are made but this also keeps everyone accountable as well Ur that everyone works together to get that same goal to get upgraded as quickly and easily and simply as possible because governance will also set the standard and policies that are used around all parts of you know the organization this helps them things keep things um Con well consistent as much as it possibly can be and also flexible to whoever actually is having the particular issue helps everyone get the resources like money people jobs technology we need to make sure we keep that thing but one of the most important things the governance as you've already read toate is help manage risk This Means Everything things like cultural differences laws technology issues coming up ways with different problems and minimizing those as much as possible I mean communication is key during those upgrades or else everybody doesn't know when you're going to upgrade how you're going to upgrade and whether you need to test for certain upgrades or whether even an upgrade can can take place due to you know uh maybe certain priorities of of the organization I've experienced that myself to be honest uh governance also ensures that you know everyone follows those rules and regulations in their regions and there's nothing to worry about as part of doing that and and you're not passionate about this topic at all right Dale no definitely not as you can tell right um something I spent many years doing actually to be honest um I I worked for service now for a very very long time also was part of partner ecosystem but also was a customer for a fair amount of years before rejoining service now so I've been around quite a lot in terms of knowing all of the different facets that kind of make up um implementations of service now and run quite a few of them myself and the key thing I've always come back down to is governance is key that the larger the organization and the bigger the the implementation on the platform the more critical it is to actually have that governance in place yep 100 per. all right well thank you Dale um appreciate your passion and all all the information you brought to us today no from all our next guest is the inimitable Paige Duffy hi Paige hey BR um thank thanks for having me so I'm going to talk a little bit about tips for a successful upgrade um and most of this comes from my own experience so well let's start with your first tip yeah so the first thing is to limit your scope and so what does this mean um when we're limiting our scope we're looking to reduce risk and we do that by really resisting the urge to activate new plugins or applications so with Washington I know there are a lot of really cool things that are coming out um I have found that if you delay even by a week turning on all those new shiny things and separating them from your upgrade you're reducing that risk to the upgrade uh because it never fails that when you turn on something new like that there are issues or people don't understand how it works and that starts to reflect on your upgrade itself instead of you know bucketing those things out Um this can also mean that you perhaps delay your normal upgrade releas or your normal release so if you release on a cycle say once a week maybe for that week of your upgrade instead of having your normal release you delay that a few days or a week so again we're just creating that separation between our upgrade and our normal release cycle uh but really the the idea here is to focus on just having a pleasant upgrade experience so make the upgrade about the upgrade focus on the upgrade and hopefully you'll find that you have far less things like incidents or defects that come through and you're just creating that really pleasant experience where hopefully your customers don't even notice that you've upgraded yeah that would be the the best case scenario right y all right but that does not mean we don't communicate we'll cover that later but yeah communication is a common theme I think for today yeah so your next um tip is around setting expectations can you talk a little bit about that yeah so definitely that kind of leads into what I just said about Communications um so when we're setting expectations if we can advance to the next slide no wor uh again we're communicating clearly so we're communicating to our stakeholders we're letting them know when we're doing different things we're being very transparent about what we're doing so we're not just telling people hey we're upgrading we're also maybe telling them what that whole timeline looks like so when we're upgrading our sub prods if they have some sort of interest in our sub production when we're allowing them to test um when we're closing down the testing window all of that communication should be very very clear um it also allows you to set expectations we are not turning on any new plugins for this upgrade here's the timeline in which we can start turning on new plugins um you're also telling them as they're testing how they're going to report defects you're making it very clear what that process is so that they know what they need to do what instance they need to go into how they need to do the testing how they need to report the def effect so that you can prioritize those correctly and get the fixs before your upgrade um and then lastly you know present them with a a go live schedule let them know what the goal live date looks like so the day of your actual upgrade um you know at this time in the morning we're going to um do a clone down of prod uh and I think I've got an example on the later slide but then once the upgrade starts at this time you know here's what you can expect it should take about 3 to 5 hours and then once that's done open it for you know production testing Etc so just making all of those timelines super super clear to your stakeholders that's awesome um studying expectations can really make a break an experience um so next up you have a tip about reducing upgrade time I'm guessing a lot of people are going to be interested in this topic probably and and again a lot of this really comes from my my own experience with upgrades and um you know noticing a an exceedingly long upgrade window uh so um kind of the first step to that though is understanding how long your upgrade is actually going to take whenever you are upgrading one of your sub prod instances you can do it in such a way that you get a pretty good general idea of how long that's actually going to take on your production instance it's not going to be exact because they are different instances but by doing something that we call um you know a full clone or an audit clone you can make it more closely resemble your production instance and so we do this by as you can see on the image um including your audit and your log data and including your attachment data so your instance should look pretty similar to production should be a pretty similar size it's about as close you as you can get with an actual clone uh and then once it's done you can see how long that actually took and then here in a second we'll talk about ways that you can you know reduce that time so here is an image oh sorry go ahead just lots of good stuff here so you're on a roll so um here is an image of the upgrade Center um once your upgrade has been completed in your sub production instance you can find a lot of really good information in your upgrade Center we're really focusing on the the duration items at the bottom so the schemas change by duration and then the uh top 10 plugins by duration uh you can also you know continue to see more than just 10 but it's going to show you those top 10 this helps you to identify the things that are taking the longest and for me what I have found is that sometimes you can use that information to mitigate some of that upgrade link um and in my past we had an upgrade that was taking significantly longer than any of our other upgrades had in our sub production instance and I started diving into it and there were a bunch of plugins that were being activated as part of that upgrade that we could go ahead and activate and and by doing that we shaved off about an hour and a half of our upgrade time so that's one of the ways that you can can really reduce that upgrade time all right and I think you have a bonus for us here for some people I do so my last suggestion if you can do it there there's some caveat to this is to backup production and what I mean by this is prior to your upgrade we usually would do it the day of but prior to your upgrade take and schedule for a full backup of your production instance down to a sub production instance so really only works if you have several sub production instances if you have kind of a a a three instance pipeline this may not work for you but if you have one that you can leave and set for a couple of weeks this is great to have the primary use that I have found for this is that when issues are reported I can confirm whether or not that issue that's being reported is related to the upgrade or if it's something that already existed in production that doesn't mean we don't want want to fix it but it helps us to prioritize things we want to prioritize issues that were caused by the upgrade that are new versus issues that have maybe existed for months that that nobody noticed or reported because they weren't paying as much attention we all know that after an upgrade people tend to pay more attention to what's going on um so again it just it really helps us to prioritize those true upgrade defects yeah that uh that's really important um because people do put a a microscope on things after you do an upgrade all right do you've got a a timeline example here that you can walk us through yep um so this is just a very high level example of kind of an upgrade timeline so from the start of upgrading your subr all the way to actually going live so as you can see here we start with performing that full audit clone we schedule our upgrade start to remediate skip changes and it's really important you need to remediate those skip changes um we review our upgrade summary we look at store apps and plugins that need to be updated so not new ones that we want to install but things that need to be updated as part of the upgrade um and we also start to see ways that we could potentially shorten that window if we need to then we start testing that may be ATF that may be uh manual testing it may be both then the week of the upgrade um like I said we clone down production into a subr that we can leave sitting there uh to mention this usually about two weeks is a good timeline for this though then we actually upgrade once you're upgraded you know have a plan for post-upgrade support So now that we've upgraded maybe the team's going to be on a call the next morning for four hours just in case there's any major issues just have a plan for that and then after that we go back to business as usual you can release that production instance back into your normal pipeline or sub production instance sorry back into um your normal pipeline you can start doing releases again and turn on all the fancy new features that you want and that's really great I'm hoping everybody on the call can find this helpful because people are usually looking for advice or you know something around the timeline so this is really great that you've got this all kind of mapped out here and then um I know you do have this one last slide of your summarizing your tips right this is really just for anyone that wants to take a Qui a quick screenshot as it's been mentioned several times um in the chat you'll also be able to have these slides afterwards but um you know I found it really nice to just have a quick summary of of what I talked about so yep 100% you know the the tldr um okay so thank you Paige appreciate it no problem um we have one last poll before we introduce our last speaker and this is do you use ATF which Paige just basically recently mentioned um so if you don't know what that stands for I guess you're going to take option A and then um we have B we use ATF C we use it with test generator or D we use it with cloudrunner and test generator um so got some good results coming in or he about people using ATF but it looks like we have a a fair amount of the audience that's not aware of it um so hopefully we can take give you some takeaways here that'll help you learn more about that and we have a couple of you know folks that are using the test generator and the cloudrunner and the test generator which is awesome all right so I guess there's some coming in the chat here too is they're they're not using so yeah that is another um option that we could have probably included on here all right so we've got let's see pretty good participation here it looks like the responses are have slowed down so let's go ahead and move on to the rest of the presentation here um so what we're going to do here now is I'm going to turn it over to OA and if you'll just give us a moment here um he's going to provide some videos with um some demos of some of these platform tools here and so we're just going to take a second here to change the screen share okay all right so um starting here from my instant's homepage I'm going to navigate to the ATF test module I'm going to click the new button to create a new test and I'm going to go ahead and call it whatever I like from here uh we'll arrive at the standard ATF test form I'm going to go ahead and add some test steps so we'll click add a test step and what I want to do is I want to open an incident form in service operations workspace so we'll start by searching for the open a new form step can I click next now here is probably the most important part of this demo which is the ability to choose from different workspaces or different versions of the platform UI by default we have selected here in form UI standard UI uh which basically refers to any pre-ex UI experience interface U sometimes called ui6 also um now in this case I actually want to choose service operations workspace you can also so note that there are other workspaces available here to select from and for table I'm going to go ahead and put incident then I'll submit to create the step and we can see the step has been added the test I'm going to go ahead and add a second one and now I want to fill out this form and so the step to do that is set field values note that the mandatory Fields have already been populated I'm going to go ahead and just fill these out with any value just for demo purposes finally one more step here I want to submit my form I'm going to click submit a form I'm going to confirm that the step will assert that the form is submitted to server successfully you may notice that on the subsequent steps this field is already filled out we actually fill it out using the value from the prior step which means if you set it to a workspace in the first step you can expect that all subsequent steps are going to automatically have this populated to the uh matching value is the first step from here after my form has been filled out and submitted I want to click a UI action and what we're going to do is we're going to click the assign to me action and what this does is it's going to assign the instant to my active user which in this case because this is kind of a trivial test it's just going to be system administrator so I'm going to go ahead and select assigned to me uh When selecting UI actions make sure that you choose one that's relevant for what you're testing so in this case this is a Surface operation workspace version of this action I'll submit this step and finally I'm going do one final step which is do a field values validation to assert that the assigned to value on the form is set to my current user which is system administrator so from here we can go ahead and click run tests to bring up our browser picker and in this Cas I'm just going to run the test locally and what we're going to see is we're going to see the instant form opened up in service operations workspace we will see it populate short description and caller see a submit and finally we will click the assign to me button and validate that it is assigned to system administrator and it actually goes pretty fast and back to our test form we can see that the step or that the test did indeed succeed yeah so um that was the the demo for um workpace Coming Up in Washington then the next demo would be about performance testing which expecting you guys to start using it's a quick demo of the performance testing tool in ATF coming up in the Washington release so here I have a demo instance uh running Washington release um the main focus of the tool is to help customers find performance regressions especially earlier in their development cycle um a lot of times performance is an afterthought when when doing development and a lot of the issues arise once they uh hit production so this tool aims to help customers find those regressions sooner in their development cycle making use of all the the great things that ATF offers already go ahead and click uh cloudrunner and accept the acknowledgement that uh we will be pausing the instance for the duration of the test uh this is going to happen if you run a test test a suite or a schedule so it's the same for all type of performance tests when I hit run test the instance will pause and it will give a 10minute cool down period to allow any jobs to to finish executing and also to allow the memory and and the the instance to go back to a steady state before starting the tests um I have disabled that for demo purposes for now but in a actual in that would be the case so once you hit run test we issue a system pause and we wait for a cool down of 10 minutes going to go ahead and click run you'll see a total of 11 runs in here so the very first one is a warm-up run and 10 sequential runs so all of these executed sequentially actually the warm-up run is so that we do any server side caching um so that we warm up the cache basically on the server site so that the actual Runs run through one through 10 um have a better uh cash localization and again this is all in effort to stabilize the results so I'm going to let this run but I'm going to skip forward in the video so that we get to the result this run is done here and just to recap we pause the system we waited for about 10 minutes for the instance to cool down for the cool in Period basically now uh we ran one warmup and 10 runs so all these execute sequentially and now we're done so I'm going to go ahead and click go to result and this is going to take me to a new table introduced with this with this future is called a performance run table very simple table it basically just acts as a container for all our runs here so we have a total of 11 runs you can see this one's marked as a warm-up and the Step results here now you'll see a button right here and a link as well as here to to uh the UI actions to compare the performance results so this is the part where it's the most customers so once we have performance runs and we want to compare them I can go ahead and do that so I can compare a test against another test right so the same test uh or I can also compare a suite versus a suite or a suite against a test as long as that test also exists in the suite so for this demo I'm just going to compare to a previous run that I had done so I'm going to click here you're prompted with this model here I'm going to select it uh from this same test right here so I'm going to select from test but a previous run that I had done for basic UI tests and go ahead and click that and I'm going to click okay okay now this is going to take me to this new form called performance comparison so once you have multiple runs you can always navigate to The Run and to the performance run and click the compare button but you can also find that under performance profiling in ATF uh you'll see basically an entry for both of those new two tables so the performance runs themselves or a performance comparison so you can also create a performance comparison by just clicking new here and selecting your runs um but from a ux perspective it's probably easier if you're already at a in a performance run to just hit that all right um so for the folks that um don't use ATF you can actually see some of the benefits you get for um using our own testing platform before you do your upgrades um but I think that's all for the demo okay thank you I will take the screen share back here all right so thank you for that oinka I hope everybody enjoyed that I know most of the time demos are uh the best part of the webinars um so let's review a couple of key takeaways and I'll review some resources that you'll be getting in the deck that we'll be sending out and then we'll open up for Q&A and I'll try to get through this pretty quickly here because I know we are getting up on time so there's a couple you know the key takeaways here are summarized again you know I don't need to this to you this is another one of those um slides that if you want to take a screenshot um just to get a quick summary that's all you know maybe something you want to do and you can also obviously this will be in the deck that we send out um also I want to bring your attention to the Washington DC release upgrade kit which will be available in March when Washington DC goes generally available and what you can find in that is a summary of each of the products and what the updates are to them including anything about artificial intelligence and then we'll also have a summary of all the artificial intelligence things blocked together so you can see it in two different ways one just the AI stuff together and one the AI how it's embedded into each individual product um and it's also localized in a couple of different languages we have it available in English Japanese and Korean currently and potentially I'll be moving that into some additional languages in the future um and you can also find you know the plan your upgrade out here and some other resources and then also you probably want to go out to this page and subscribe because then you'll see any updates of new information that are coming out to the releases and upgrades page all right so these are some resources that are available to you obviously I don't anticipate that you're going to be able to try to figure out what all these are um this will again be included in the the deck that you receive I do just want to call out one thing here if you happen to be a customer who has purchased our impact product we have a couple of accelerators that you may find to be useful when you're doing an upgrade so there's a jump start your upgrade and there's also whoops sorry I didn't mean to do that there's a um jump start your automated testing so those are available to you if you're an impact customer and so you may want to talk to your squad for more information about those all right and then don't forget to join us at Future community events there will be events that are based on product um upgrades or changes that'll be happening the last week of March and the first week of April so you know make sure you go out to our live on service now events page on the community and register for any of those events that are going to be of interest to you all right and now for the long awaited Q&A so um we're going to take a second here to review some questions and we'll start with um if paig or Dale or o if you have one you want to start with feel free um also I just I want to apologize again for having the wrong information about the um end of life um um excuse me um so it is n minus one um going forward and I'll make sure that those slides get updated before they get sent out um so do we have any questions here that anybody wants to take on this seems to be a common theme I'll take one on this one around plugins and upgrades because obviously we do have quite a lot of you know family based releases but we also have a lot of plugins that are store-based that kind of come through and there's a couple of good different kind of good practices that people are either suggesting sharing on on there as well around upgrading certain plugins before you do an upgrade um but I always think that's a great idea to do but some upgrades are also dependent on certain versions of families to come out like you know we do certify all of the plugins according to kind of the families that they're on now as part of the early adopters program and as going through to GA any service now particular plugin will be certified for the family release before it comes out but there is a bit of a road to kind of get there and I appreciate there's also quite a lot of plugins that probably a lot of people are using But ultimately you know they're we're trying to make some improvements around plugins around um making it simpler and easier for people to kind of upgrade all of their plugins at the same time uh it's not perfect at the moment we understand that but there's also you know we do have the backlog facilities where you can kind of order or you know have running have them upgrading in the background in order for you to run them um so you're not having to go in and test them all the time but due to the nature of plugins and the fact that they're changing themselves underneath that we can't kind of just say upgrade all the plugins the minute you do a uh an upgrade to a particular family version because we just don't know what unpredictability that will bring into your system and we want to make it as stable as possible all right thank you D um I do see there's some questions here about the upgrade plans and unfortunately I don't think we have an expert on the panel here today that can help with those questions so if you want to um provide your email information if you have questions about the upgrade plan um I can track down the appropriate person to get back to you um we have a question here from U RIS shakar um we signed up for the early release program if we upgrade to Washington as part of this release program how's this different from General availability when DC is generally available should we run another upgrade wherever we upgraded um so what happens when when you're in the early release program you do get a version uh a month ahead of the generally available release um so you know and then when the generally available release comes out you can go in and schedule the upgrade for that because you'll want to get off the EA and onto the ga once that becomes available is there anybody else who wants to add any color on that one all right um Alicia had a question here about how we set up rules for Autos schedule changes only happening on weekends um we recently had a patch with a two-hour outage that was implemented on a Monday morning my best suggestion for that would be uh would be to make sure that you're monitoring your automatically scheduled changes and then you can request a time change for those and then you could also put a comment in the change and ask the now support team how you can get this um set up so that this doesn't um you know continue to happen unfortunately we weren't able to get someone from now support to join today so that's um I'm not able to give you a better answer than that unfortunately I'm sorry um any other questions anybody else wants to take as I'm just going to scroll through here and kind of go through them um I sorry I I'm also scrolling through them there there are quite a few um there was one more question around what in minus one means for Marcus so does that mean you can never skip One release to be 100% supported no grace period for example if I'm on Vancouver and wait for zanado do the day Zan 2 G is release vancouber is no longer support and I'm out of support um so I really recommend that that KB article and and I can find that link again but it it covers all of that in in pretty pretty good detail um technically speaking yes the moment that zanado do is GA those other other in or those other versions are not under support but it's not like we instantly upgrade you the moment that GA is available um there's a lot of notifications that come through and again that KB article provides you all the timelines um so and and just another point of clarification that might also be different depending on your contract so if you're hearing me say n minus one and you're like whoa whoa whoa that's that's not what my contract says if you're in doubt ask your account manager um they're they're going to have a better sense of what your specific contract is um but the general policy is just in minus one so unless you have it specified in your contract should be you were a customer before we went to that um policy yes it's generally the older older contracts um even even if you have n minus two so even if you have n minus two we still recommend n minus one you want to get the latest features the latest everything that's in there um the contract's the contract but there's a reason why we are so encouraging of n minus one and getting you to upgrade the the more often you upgrade the easier the upgrades are and if you have built out your ATF tests and you have a plan it's not as painful when you only do it once a year it hurts because nobody remembers how to do it um but if we get into the practice of doing our our store releases the quarterly store releases to get new features there to do our normal patching we're doing our normal um we're going through this process every time we're releasing some internal change as a customer it gets easier it gets easier and and so that's why we recommend that that's why we have modified our new contracts going forward or our new contracts are in minus one because it's a really good thing to do um not just it's it's not arbitrary a lot of thought behind it and benefit for our customers yeah when you get into that rinse lather repeat cycle it gets easier um Paige I think this is a good question for you is it good to upgrade during your regular Sprint cycle you know I mean that that varies um at my previous location we we we typically did our upgrades on our normal release windows so we released every Wednesday um that kind of went along with our Sprint cycle it's just for those wday Wednesday releases we would delay our normal um release that would have occurred on that Wednesday so we're still doing our Norm we were still doing our normal Sprint work and then kind of the upgrade work was going along in parallel um you may find that doesn't work it depends on how large your Dev team is it depends on how many instances you have um there there's a lot of dependencies there that that may make it different for your organization now Adam since you jumped on U this might be one that you could address um are you considering a solution to automate plugin upgrades related to the service now store with Vancouver we had to manually upgrade 100 plugins which is tedious work and that takes half a day to perform since they were only done by one person so so there's a couple things to do there one um the next time I see the product manager of that I'm going to upgrade their instance and make them sit down and upgrade every single one of those and make them feel that pain I feel it too um so you yeah yes I mean we've always had to do that that's that's how it's always worked not with the plugins but the store apps you've always had to upgrade one at a time as more moves into there um it's painful to get those upgrades they do upgr when you upgrade it is going to pull up to the latest version but to the latest supported version the minimum version you need but if you want the latest version you're going to sit there for a while um there is a batch installer API um so a couple things one you can just schedule them so you don't have to sit there and wait and let it run uh but two if you're little more adventurous right now and even going back to Utah at least Utah maybe even a little bit before then there's a batch install API where you can just you can set it up yourself to just upgrade them all there's I think there's a few Community discussions about doing that um but uh absolutely it's some pain how do we make it simpler smoother um I will add a note too this is really important in Vancouver I think this is where when we went to the new um application manager and it's showing the store things we we improve the speed of the app manager by running a job that pulls the list of all the store UPS because before when you pulled up the store when you pulled up the app manager it was always going to get what's the latest what's the latest what's the latest so we said earlier we only release once a month so that's a lot of checks and a lot of waiting that you don't need to do so we have a job to do it when you do an upgrade when you go to the app manager make sure the first thing you do is check the last sync time and you're probably going to want to press the button to sync um because it only gets a list of the latest Store app apps once a day and so it could be you know 23 hours and 59 minutes since you upgraded and still showing you the old versions the only old stuff so make sure when you do go to upgrade once your upgrade completes go to the App Manager press the sync button right away it'll take a minute get all those new versions and then you can choose what you want to upgrade and again using the schedule is something I do today um but um uh you know how do I how do I do an upgrade all um how do I have some multi select how do we make that a little bit easier to create a batch for you are all things we're talking about um and figuring out how to make that happen without introducing just too much churn uh and what that and how that works so we're working on it I feel your pain I definitely feel your pain when I go I just upgraded to Washington and sat there for a while um so we'll we'll work continue to work on that thank you Adam that's really helpful um we have another question here from Trent are there any resources available for sample testing plans we have our own but I'd love to see how others are managing it and I was wondering if P might have anything around that I apologize I was answering a question so I did not I did not hear what you what you asked um Trent asking if there's any resources available for sample testing plans um I I'm not necessarily aware of any um I mean I know there's some like sample ATF plans out there uh but General testing plans I'm not I'm not really aware of any uh primarily because that's so unique from company to company it's kind of hard to to do a lot of generic plans yeah um and onlya this one's for you Mary go ahead I was gonna say the sample plans quick start test for for ATF for your applications is the is the best example of that um on the automated side if we already knew what the plan was we'll we'll automate it and there are several hundred and maybe a few thousand quick tests um that walk you through all those things that that test out of the box and you can modify them as needed and then you retain them um so that's where we put our efforts and and our product teams is to ship quick start test so make sure you look for whatever area you're looking what you're installing look for another app that sits with it with quick start tests sometimes they just ship in the app sometimes they're a separate Plugin or or separate Store app but take a look at those quick start tests um it'll explain what it does if you for some reason wanted to do it manually but it's a great place just to to copy it and and modify it for your needs and there's one other question here that is probably good for you Adam is the ATF performance metrics store up going away um I think yinka was answering that but my okay sorry recollection of that is that that yink can correct me but I believe that was an innovation lab app actually put out by RIT team um that was developing it wasn't from our engineering team and that uh the new version should replace that that that was an innovation lab app it was a kind of a proof of concept um but what you want is the new performance testing that is releasing with Washington and uses cloudrunner um it's a the the new version's much new and improved and I do not know there's anything that you used um that's in that's in the Innovation lab one that we don't have but the new one is has certainly been more hardened tested and validated so I I would I would probably stop my use of the the one Innovation lab and start once I get to Washington and use the new performance testing built into ATF that's that is the Innovation lab one is not fully supported it's why it's an innovation lab there something to take a look at the new one is absolutely fully supported it is part of ATF it is part of the platform if you have an issue put a case in and we will address it yeah and I I also want to add also for for the guys that don't know about ATF we'll releasing a couple of walk through videos later in February so you can um look at our community page to get all those videos later on all right and I'm really sorry we are at time we're not going to get through all these questions there will be a survey that goes out after the webinar so if you have a question that wasn't answered you can provide us with your email information and we can get back to you and I all will also take the unanswered questions and create a blog that will be on our releases and upgrades page on the Community page so really thank you all for joining and bringing these great questions um also just a reminder we have some on demand webinars that are available as well you can find those on our live on service now events page on the community and um you know we have two two of our experts from the platform team here Adam and oinka and um if you want to get more information their group runs um platform Academy sessions and you can scan this QR code and sign up for some of those so again we thank you all very much for joining today sorry about the misinformation at the beginning of the webinar hope you got something out of this and um thank you for joining and have a great day