Best Practices for fetching Archived records.

[gangaram_ka]

Hi Community,

We have a requirement to fetch archival records that are more than one year old. Before implementing this, I would like to understand:

1. What are the best practices for retrieving archived records in ServiceNow?
2. Will querying or accessing these archival tables impact system performance?
3. Is there a recommended approach (reports, scheduled jobs, direct table query, etc.) to safely retrieve older archived data?

Any guidance or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Gangaram Kasture

[Tanushree Maiti]

Hi @gangaram_ka 

Find your ans:

1. Archival best Practice: https://www.perspectium.com/blog/servicenow-archiving-best-practices/

  Also refer:https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-blog/optimizing-servicenow-data-lifecycle-archiving-r...

2. As per this post: https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/data-archiving-performance-impact/m-p/1996860

By default an archive rule follows these processing rules:

• Archives 100 records for each batch job
• Sleeps 1 second between batch jobs
• Runs 10 batch jobs in an archive run (every hour)

If you change the interval of job from 1 hour to some lower value, job may sometimes not finished in 1 hour and hence it will not run but if archive threads will pick up to run on other node it can cause problems. Check this kb article:

https://hi.service-now.com/kb_view.do?sys_kb_id=116b858e0ffd424098f7982be1050efe

You still have option to run 10 batch jobs every hour and 100 records per batch job (1000 records). And performance of job depends on several factors like size of table, indexes, performant queries and instance config. So before moving forward I would recommend to clone one subprod from prod and check the performance if archive job.

3.  Check this: https://www.servicenow.com/community/developer-forum/reporting-on-archived-tables/td-p/1961315/page/...

Overall all data archiving details , you will get here:

https://www.servicenow.com/community/servicenow-ai-platform-articles/data-archiving-walkthrough/ta-p...