Plan an upgrade of IT Service Intelligence

Plan an on-premises IT Service Intelligence upgrade. Splunk Cloud customers must work with Splunk Support to coordinate upgrades to IT Service Intelligence.

This version of ITSI supports upgrading from version 4.0.x or later. To upgrade from earlier versions, perform intermediary upgrades.

Before you upgrade Splunk IT Service Intelligence

1. Unzip and run the following script on the search head: Check_kpi_entity_configs.zip. The script outputs a list of entities that might break as a result of the strict entity association change described in Removed features in IT Service Intelligence.
2. Make sure no service templates are syncing. Check the sync status of service templates by clicking Configure > Service Templates from the ITSI main menu.
3. Perform a full backup of the search head. For information, see Back up and restore ITSI KV store data. To back out of the upgrade, you must restore the prior version of Splunk IT Service Intelligence from a backup.
4. If you've made any changes to the itsi_rules_engine.properties file, make a copy of it before upgrading. Upgrading overwrites any changes you made. After the upgrade is complete, you must re-implement any changes you made to the file.
5. Make sure the Splunk admin role inherits from the itoa_admin role. The default settings for admin role inheritance for ITSI are contained in authorize.conf. Problems can occur when these settings have been modified in a local version of the file.
6. Review the compatible versions of the Splunk platform. See Splunk Enterprise system requirement.
7. Review the hardware requirements to make sure that your server hardware supports ITSI. See Planning your hardware requirements.
8. Review known issues and removed features in the latest release of IT Service Intelligence. See Known issues and Removed features in the ITSI Release Notes manual.
9. Check KV store size limits. The limit of a single batch save to a KV store collection is 50 MB. Check the total amount of data that your services contain, and, if necessary, increase the KV store size limit in limits.conf.

Recommendations for upgrading IT Service Intelligence

Upgrade the Splunk platform and IT Service Intelligence in different maintenance windows. See the Splunk Enterprise system requirements to verify which versions of Splunk ITSI and Splunk Enterprise are supported with each other.

1. Upgrade Splunk Enterprise to a compatible version. See How to upgrade a distributed Splunk Enterprise environment in the Splunk Enterprise Installation Manual.
2. Upgrade Splunk platform instances.
3. Upgrade Splunk IT Service Intelligence.
4. Review, upgrade, and deploy add-ons.
5. See Version-specific upgrade notes for post-installation tasks.

Upgrading ITSI deployed on a search head cluster is a multi-step process. The procedure is detailed in Upgrade IT Service Intelligence in a search head cluster environment in this manual.