I’m currently reviewing a whole bunch of skipped upgrades at work, and had something that was perplexing me, so I thought that I’d share my findings with you.
I was seeing items that were coming up as being different from baseline, but when I looked at the version history on the item, it was showing one version from ~3 years ago that was the ‘current’ version of the script. There were also one or two versions with recent dates, but nothing before that current version.
All I could come up with was that no version history was being created until after a script was changed, and then once it was changed, only the modification was saved as a version in the history.
That accounted for the behavior I was seeing historically, but seemed like a sub-optimal way of doing things since it meant that you couldn’t easily compare your changed version to baseline–at least not before it popped up as part of a skipped change when upgrading from one version of ServiceNow to another.
I ended up submitting a ticket to HI Support asking for clarification on what I was seeing. It turns out that when you edit something, two versions are saved (the original and the modified version). That was what I’d been expecting to see, and honestly is something I should have tested before reaching out to HI Support, but that didn’t account for what I was actually seeing as I was looking at our skipped upgrades.
That, it turns out, is because ServiceNow had some problems with how they were doing version tracking ~3 years ago, so if you look at something that was first changed back in that time frame you don’t get the normal version tracking the way that it is done now.