Instance Cloning

please note this document is applicable for those customers who have a production and non production environment(s) if you only have a production environment but are interested in a non production environment please contact your account manager or log a support request and the team will connect you with the appropriate servicely representative overview in servicely, maintaining alignment between your production environments and non production environments (e g development and/or testing) is crucial for successful application development and deployment our instance cloning service provides the ability to create exact copies of your “source” environment (e g production), enabling you to apply this to your non production environments what is instance cloning? instance cloning is the process of creating a copy of an existing instance (we call this the “source” environment and it is typically your production environment) and applying it to another environment (we call this the “target” environment and it is typically your non production environment) the target environment will inherit all configurations, data (tickets, users, companies, locations, cmdb, etc), user permissions, and configurations from the source instance, allowing you to have a fully functional replica that mirrors your live application important considerations while our instance cloning service provides a valuable solution for maintaining alignment between your environments, we encourage our customers to use it carefully you should not use this capability as a way to promote functionalities developed in a non production environment, to a production environment you should use change sets to move configuration changes instead this is because, not only instance cloning will overwrite everything in the target environment, but change sets capability has been designed to package your selected/tracked configuration that can be imported into the target environment without overwriting anything else you should review the state of your non production environment before requesting for a clone if there is an ongoing development in your clone target environment that you do not want an instance clone process to overwrite, please take a backup first if what you want to backup are change sets, please close and export them and if they are data, you should also export them, but into an excel or csv re import them after the clone is completed there are certain configurations/processes that you may not want the target clone environment to run immediately post clone one example is email, as a target environment will receive exact configuration that the source environment has having a target environment sending emails out to your users or reading the servicely mailboxes before your source environment does, are the typical consequences therefore, you would want the target environment to not process emails after it starts back up post clone, by having both its inbound and outbound email processing job, disabled this will give you time to ensure that you can reconfigure the target environment to use email configurations you want, before you re activate those jobs this is why we have system configuration scripts they can be configured to run tasks like disabling those inbound and outbound email processing jobs they can be added to overtime but typically as part of your servicely implementation projects, they would have been configured to deal with the common use cases such as said disabling of emails how to request an instance clone to get started with the cloning process, you will need to submit a request through our support portal please follow the steps below step 1 access the support portal navigate to https //support servicely ai log in using your registered account credentials step 2 fill out the clone request form once logged in, go to the "service catalog" section select "instance clone request" from the list of available items complete the form with the following details source instance specify the production instance you wish to clone target instance indicate the environment you want the instance cloned to (a non production such as development, testing) justification describe the purpose of the clone (e g , feature development, testing new integrations) preferred date & time if applicable, suggest a timeframe for when you would like the cloning process to occur step 3 submit your request review the details provided and submit the request by clicking the "submit" button step 4 confirmation and follow up once your request has been submitted, you will receive a confirmation email containing a summary of your request our support team will review your submission, and if necessary, they may reach out for additional information or clarification you will be informed when the cloning process has been completed, along with any relevant details about the newly created instance faqs q how long does the cloning process take? a the duration of the cloning process typically depends on the size of the production instance and any scheduled maintenance you will receive an estimated completion time when your request is processed q will user data be carried over to the cloned instance? a yes, all configurations, user permissions, and data will be cloned to the new instance, providing a complete replica of the original environment q can i request a clone of any instance? a yes, however we disable the ability to clone from a non production instance to production please consult with our support team if you have any specific requirements regarding cloning from other instances q can i cancel my clone request? a yes, if you need to cancel your request, contact our support team as soon as possible if the cloning process has not yet started, we will be able to cancel your request q will my instance go down whilst this happens? a your source instance will not go down during this process, but the target instance will have a small outage q does the clone take up to date data? a clones typically use the last backup of your instance, meaning it will typically be < 24 hours for production to non productions q do i have re set up any integrations, sso and / or email processing? a yes, as all configurations are taken from production, so you will need to re set it up for non production please note upon clone completion, all system configuration scripts will run on the target instance usually configured as part of your initial servicely implementation project, you will have scripts that will disable/enable certain configurations specific for a non production instance example is to disable both inbound and outbound email processing jobs