Store ServiceNow attachments on 3rd Party System without losing it's relationship

[Lucas Sim_es1]

Hello Experts!

We're facing an issue at my company where the sys_attachment_doc table is consuming more than 4TB.

The solution we're looking for is to store record's attachments outside ServiceNow keeping the possibility to download it using it's link (or something similar). This is our approach because we can't delete attachments created on the last 5 years.

Did you face something like this?

Best regards,
Lucas Simões

[Tony K]

Has ServiceNow said something that the size is an issue and you need to find a 3rd party to host them? My first thought would be to see what they say first before going through the hassle of shifting them all to a 3rd party and trying to maintain the ability to access them via a link to a different provider. This sounds like it could be an additional cost with another service, then the tech debt to setup, maintain it and test with every upgrade as well. 

Another option is that you can archive within ServiceNow too.  Maybe this will generate some ideas.

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/vancouver-platform-administration/page/administer/database-...

[Lucas Sim_es1]

Tony,

We are searching for this solutions by ourselves because ServiceNow's DB expansions is too expensive and  there are cheaper (but still good) alternatives.

I don't think thar archiving will solve this issue because it'll consume our DB anyways.

Thanks for your reply!

Kind Regards,
Lucas Simões

[Mark Roethof]

Hi there,

Don't have any experience on hosting attachments on a 3rd party system.

Though responding to the attachments and its size itself. Did you also investigate if the attachments are also valid? For example:
- Cleanup floating attachments
- Lower duration attachments exports are kept
- Cleanup attachments on old inactive knowledge articles
- Cleanup attachments from list exports
- Cleanup attachments from scheduled email of reports
- Are you duplicating attachments, from for example parent to child records (and other way around), which is not really correct way of working/designing

Etc..

Based on a recent customer for example, their attachment table was 1.1 TB. After some cleanups, only 324 GB...

Also see:
https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-platform-blog/keeping-your-instance-database-footprint-tidy...

[Lucas Sim_es1]

Hi Mark,

First of all, thanks for your reply.

It'll help us to delete some unused attachments for sure but most of them need to be available for at least 5 years due to our legal system.

Kind Regards,
Lucas Simões