Planning the upgrade

When preparing for the upgrade, take into account the environments that you have in your pipeline. To ensure that the upgrade process goes smoothly, use the following best practices:

1. Start the upgrade process by cloning your staging environment. In this way, you will be able to run the upgrade and test the application afterwards without interrupting other work that is happening in the staging environment.
2. Run the pre-upgrade check on the cloned staging environment.
3. Upgrade the cloned staging environment.
4. Note and resolve any potential issues that occurred during or after the staging upgrade.
5. Upgrade the production environment as soon as possible after the cloned staging environment, to ensure that there are few differences between the staging and production data.
6. After the production upgrade is completed successfully, upgrade any other environment that you have in your pipeline, for example, staging, development, QA, or BOE.
7. Optional: Upgrade your Next-Best-Action Designer in a staging environment and review the performance of your strategies to ensure that they continue to give the expected results. For more information, see Upgrading the Next-Best-Action Designer.

Upgrade paths

This upgrade process is intended for upgrades from the following application versions to Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.6:

• Pega Customer Decision Hub 7.22-7.4
• Pega Marketing 7.13-7.4
• Pega Marketing for Communications 7.13-7.4
• Pega Marketing for Financial Services 7.13-7.4

For an overview of the upgrade paths available when upgrading from older versions of Pega Customer Decision Hub, see Pega Marketing and Pega Customer Decision Hub upgrade paths.

Communications and financial services applications merged with Pega Customer Decision Hub

The following industry-specific applications are not available as standalone applications in version 8.6:

• Pega Customer Decision Hub for Communications 8.5
• Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.5
• Pega Marketing for Communications 8.4 and earlier
• Pega Marketing for Financial Services 8.4 and earlier

The capabilities of these applications are merged with Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.6. Communications service providers and financial organizations that use the previous versions of these applications can upgrade them to Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.6 by following the instructions in this upgrade guide.

Additional information

If you are upgrading from versions 8.1-8.5, see the Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.x Upgrade Guide.

If you are upgrading from a version older than 7.13, you must first upgrade to Pega Marketing 7.13, then to Pega Customer Decision Hub 8.6. For more information, see the Upgrade Guide for Pega Marketing 7.13.