Instance Clone

Care needs to be taken when cloning an instance that uses Unifi, as the connections from that instance could potentially be active in the clone target. E.g. if you clone your production instance over a development instance, then without managing the connections you could connect to production instance target from your development instance.

Unifi comes with ways to deal with these scenarios:

Clone data preservers

Unifi has clone data preservers to prevent connection records in clone targets from being overwritten, and therefore preventing production credentials and endpoints making it to sub production instacens. However, care must be taken here as you will need to add these preservers to any clone profiles you use.

Instance name on connections

This is the best way to guarantee a production connection cannot be triggered from a sub production instance, or in fact any connection being triggered from an instance it is not specified for. The connection record contains a string field called instance name. In this field add the instance name that this connection should run against, i.e. if ACMEs production instance is acme.service-now.com then the production connection instance name field should be set to acme, and if ACMEs development instance is acmedev.service-now.com then the development connection instance name field should be set to acmedev. Only when the connections instance name matches the actual instance its being triggered from will a message be sent. If an attempt is made to trigger an integration from an instance that doesn't match, the corresponding transaction will be errored, and the reason why will be provided.

Clone cleanup scripts

There are clone clean up scripts which will deactivate Unifi in the target clone instance, as well as turning off all active connections. The same issue with data preservers affects clone clean up scripts as well, so you need to make sure that any clone profiles which you use referene them. Also make sure to enable these scripts if you want to use them, they are disabled by default (as we prefer the data preservers).

Post Clone Checklist

Make sure you add Unifi to your post clone checklist. Even if you employ the highlighted methods above, its prudent to double check Unifi integrations after a clone.