Upgrade Process for Clarity on AWS

Rego has a world-class team of engineers and analysts to guide you through the entire lifecycle of Clarity upgrades.  We have experience upgrading the most complex and critical Clarity environments, and will provide you with our best-practice guidance along the way.  Our standard procedures are outlined below, these are out best practices – deviating from these best practices may introduce unnecessary risk, longer processing and additional change management. Upgrading Clarity on AWS is different than Clarity on other platforms, we appreciate your attention to these details.

 Clarity SaaS Release and Upgrade Process:

1. Visit the Broadcom website to download the current Release Notes for the version of Clarity you intend to upgrade to.  Review the Release Notes.  Distribute the documentation to your team with your advice on what areas of the upgrade pertain to them, and how they should prepare for the upgrade.

2. Work with your staff to select a window of 12 hours on a weekday to schedule an upgrade to your Clarity DEV environment.

3. Ensure all work is complete and disposable in DEV, this environment will be erased and replaced with an upgrade copy of PROD.

4. Submit the request to Rego to upgrade and refresh the DEV environment from PROD and upgrade to your selected version of Clarity. Please select “Yes” to refresh the environment unless an exception has been pre-approved by Rego.

   1. The process to erase DEV completely, then replicate PROD into DEV and upgrade it is a single process from Rego.  Separating these components is not recommended, it requires additional approvals and downtime.

5. The Rego team will collaboratively schedule your request, and provide guidance about the DEV upgrade process.

6. Once the process is complete DEV is now a mirror image of PROD Clarity and Jaspersoft, upgraded to a newer version.

7. Begin to conduct your comprehensive change management testing to ensure the upgrade is acceptable.

8. Submit a request to Rego to upgrade PROD during a selected weekend window.  In most cases, this must be planned at least 4 weeks in advance to guarantee your timeslot.

9. Prior to this PROD upgrade window, send an email to your end user community regarding a planned 12-hour maintenance window.

10. Immediately prior to the upgrade, confirm all of your scheduled jobs are paused and any end user activity is complete.

11. Rego will notify you when the upgrade is commencing within the Support Ticket, at the pre-arranged time, and provide an update within 12 hours to confirm it’s completion or communicate any issues.  No hourly or interim updates will be posted.

12. When the PROD upgrade is complete, Rego will notify you of success and guide you toward any areas of focus for your remediation.

13. After remediation, send an email to your staff that the system is back online and ready for their usage.

14. After a week of run-time in PROD with the new version of Clarity, submit a request to Rego to refresh any remaining non-PROD environments as a replicate of PROD.  Non-PROD environments will not be individually upgrade, they are intended to be replicas of the current version and configurations of PROD.

 Rego Change Management Guidance:

1. To meet our high quality standards for AWS deployments of Clarity, we reserve time after the initial release of a major version of Clarity to ensure stability, scalability and security of the release in AWS. We target the availability for deployment of a new major release into AWS Non-PROD environments two weeks after release date, and PROD environments a few weeks after that. Although new releases will be available within 2 weeks, we Recommend waiting 6 weeks for the first patch to be available as a best practice. For example, v15.9.1 was released February 8th, and AWS clients can start upgrading non-PROD environments after February 23rd. The first Clarity v15.9.1 patch is targeted for release on April 1st. Please submit a ticket to initiate the scheduling process.

2. Rego maintains a comprehensive disaster recovery and restoration program.  Production Clarity environments are backed up immediately prior to upgrades in the event a future roll back is necessary.  After a PROD upgrade is complete, any issues that cause a full outage may be logged as a new Sev1 support ticket.  If the issue cannot be resolved within 24-hours, a roll back plan may be initiated.

3. Rego conducts roll back plans with a prescribed approach to ensure a high likelihood of success.  Rego has closely managed the Clarity upgrade planning and execution for hundreds of Clarity customers, rollback plan initiation is extremely rare. The Rego subject matter experts, engineers and support staff are available 24x7 to provide heightened support of the upgrade, ensuring all Sev1 issues are remediated and mitigated promptly.  In the extremely unusual circumstance that a roll-back plan is required, Rego retains the ability to roll back on the first full business day after the PROD upgrade – this option includes the likelihood of a full business-day of outage.  Roll-back plans may be initiated if you or Rego encounter a production issue that results in a projected outage of 24 hours or more during business hours while the issues is investigated and remediated.  Any roll-back execution would be discussed and approved by Rego leadership.

4. Rego recommends customers remain current on their upgrades by executing at least one upgrade per year. In the event you are using a version of Clarity that is near it’s end-of-life cycle from Broadcom, Rego will support you for 3 months beyond the EOL data at zero additional cost. Beyond 3 months we will charge an additional 25% monthly subscription rider fee, plus a one-time fee to execute the upgrade, when appropriate, due to the large gap in versions.

Upgrade Planning Targets for Clarity SaaS:

The following table contains customer upgrade schedules for the upcoming Clarity SaaS releases. These are targeted dates and minor adjustments to the schedule may occur.