Upgrade Tips

1. Ensure the machine that hosts ServiceControl has sufficient CPU and RAM resources during upgrades. Consider temporarily adding more vCPU and RAM until the upgrade completes and afterwards trim down the resources.
2. Updating ServiceControl will stop ingesting error/audit queue messages but does not affect the sending of messages between endpoints. While an update is in progress, it's not possible to trigger retries manually via ServicePulse. Consider multiple (remote) instances if uptime of ServicePulse is important.
3. Compacting the database will not make the update run faster. Compacting should only be considered after upgrading.
4. In-place updates are recommended over side-by-side updates as they have less complexity. Consider side-by-side if ServicePulse downtime must be minimized.
5. Backup the database before upgrading.
6. Account for downtime of ServicePulse as failed messages cannot be retried when ServiceControl is not running.
7. Account for queue storage size. While ServiceControl is down, messages are not ingested but they will still build up in the queue. If the system has a high message throughput the queues act as a buffer. Ensure queues will not run out of storage (quota) space as when queues are full no new messages can be added which will cause application outage.
8. Analyze the storage size for each ServiceControl instance and update starting from the smallest to the largest. This helps understand how smaller migrations run and can be used to extrapolate how long updating the larger instances will take which can help decided whether a side-by-side upgrade is necessary.

Downgrading ServiceControl

This section contains information about downgrading ServiceControl instances and the ServiceControl Management Utility.

Instances

ServiceControl instances cannot be downgraded with the ServiceControl Management Utility. This is because the storage schema could have changed during a previous upgrade.

1. Open the ServiceControl Management Utility
2. Scroll to the instance that requires downgrading
3. Open the "Installation path"
4. Copy the ServiceControl.exe.config and store the identical instance name
5. Delete the instance but keep the database files
6. Close ServiceControl Management Utility
7. Downgrade the installer
8. Add a new instance using the same identical name and configuration as the deleted instance

Installer

There may be a need to setup a ServiceControl instance for an older version of ServiceControl, in which case follow these steps:

1. Uninstall the current (newer) version from Windows in "Add/remove programs"
2. Install the previous version

The ServiceControl Management Utility (SCMU) can now be used again to add instances based on the older version.