During a deployment, when comparing application connections, you may receive a message highlighting a significant number of differences. In more extreme cases, the message may indicate that the 40,000-difference limit has been exceeded, leading to some differences not being displayed.
A high volume of differences is expected in scenarios such as initial seeding of a security application, configuration differences, permission issues and more. However, this isn't typical in many other cases.
This article focuses on helping you uncover the cause of excessive differences and offers ways to reduce them, minimizing unnecessary noise during the selection of changes to deploy.
Possible causes and solutions
Unrefreshed Application: If deploying from an outdated application, refreshing it can resolve this. If you prefer to avoid refreshing because it contains un-promoted configuration changes, you can restore them using Tulip’s restore feature after the refresh. Alternatively, you can selectively align the application using Tulip’s compare and deploy flow, avoiding a full refresh.
Difference in the Application Connections’ Fetch Configuration: For example, the source application connection might exclude certain items during fetching, while the target includes them. Use an online tool like Diffchecker to compare configuration files and identify these differences. To resolve the issue, align the configurations to ensure consistency across application connections.
Disabled/Enabled Application Features: Aligning the fetch configuration may not suffice if certain security application features are enabled in one application connection but not the other. In such cases, ensure both application connections have similar enabled features, or exclude feature-specific elements from the configuration.
After aligning the two application connections as much as possible as described above, comparisons should include only meaningful differences.
To further reduce the amount of differences shown, consider the following approaches:
Exclude Elements from Comparison: Tulip allows you to exclude specific differences between elements across application connections during comparisons. This helps you focus on meaningful changes by ignoring selected discrepancies that are not relevant for the comparison process, or differences which are expected such as endpoint URLs, emails or other credentials. Learn more
Switch to Deployment Based on Recent Changes: Instead of comparing source and target application connections to identify all differences, consider starting your deployment with a list of changes made in the source application connection within a specific timeframe. This approach allows you to select a snapshot of your source application connection, compare it with its current state, and choose the changes to deploy to the target application connection. This method can streamline the process and focus on relevant updates. Learn more