Manage Attachment Data Growth

[Gaurav Bajaj]

One of the most critical aspects of ServiceNow platform governance is managing database growth. As the platform expands across multiple product lines and business functions, the size of database continues to grow, consuming significant storage and impacting overall performance.

If you’ve ever raised a Database Footprint request with Now Support, you’ll notice that the top most contributor to database consumption is attachment tables. This makes it essential for platform teams to build a well-defined strategy to manage attachment growth—not just to control storage costs, but also to ensure a seamless user experience and maintain platform health. 

I want to highlight a few areas(not exhaustive list - there are other community articles talking though many other areas to look at as well such as orphan data clean up etc.) that can be opted at different stages of platform expansion.

1. Establish Governance on Attachment Sizes

The first and most effective control is preventing oversized attachments from entering the platform in the first place. You can provide a standardized way to handle attachments across business functions.

Here is a step-by-step approach

1. As technical governance standard, develop a policy to allow file size up to 5-10 MB depending on various business requirements.
2.  Make sure that the policy is well communicated to business teams and vendors involved in developing solutions on ServiceNow Platform.
3. Introduce informative messaging proactively on catalog items, record producers or table form records.
4. Also place a hard-limit with system property - com.glide.attachment.max_size. Default value is 1024 MB so you can reduce it to 20-30 MB. This will ensure that the system does not accept anything beyond the value of property limit.
5. There could be several business functions looking for higher file size - GRC attestations, invoicing process etc. You can plan to introduce an exception approval for few business needs where having these large size attachments are a mandate in platform.
6. You can keep tracking growth of attachments from one specific function through reports on sys_attachment and tables related to consuming it.

The above steps will help you manage the attachment growth in initial stage of Platform operationalization.

2.  Integrate with Low-Cost External Storage

You can exercise the above option when the platform is used across multiple product lines, have high volume of transactions happening on a frequent basis.

Integrating ServiceNow with low-cost external storage reduces costs by leveraging cheaper options like Amazon S3, improving performance through a leaner database, and ensures compliance with retention and audit features—while still giving users a seamless ServiceNow front-end experience.

Here is how you can achieve it

• Integrate ServiceNow with storage providers such as OneDrive, SharePoint, Google Drive, or Amazon S3. There are several OOB spokes as well as ServiceNow store connector available to help accelerate development.
• You can plan to move attachments asynchronously to external repository as soon as its uploaded. 
• The attachment is then removed from ServiceNow, leaving only a link or reference in the record’s activity history or related list which is still accessible for the end user.
• Ensure that the security is reflected in the same way in external repository as well.

3.  Offload Legacy Data

Not every attachment needs to remain in the platform forever. For older records, attachments can be archived outside of production to optimize performance while ensuring compliance.

ServiceNow OOB archival feature is useful to improve performance on table queries but does not contribute to reduce storage sizes rather it increases the size by additional tables and logging.

Here is what you can plan to introduce.

• Implement archival strategies to move aged records and attachments into secondary storage systems.
• Tools like SnowMirror or Perspectium can continuously replicate and store ServiceNow data and attachments, allowing organizations to keep historical data accessible for audits or regulatory requirements.

I've used both and they are excellent and easy to use tools to not just offload data from ServiceNow, provide inputs to external analytics solution and provide archival solution for long run.

I hope the above options are going to be helpful in determining your platform attachment growth strategy.