What is the max alert retention period in Event Mgmt? Is it ok to retain alerts for more than 90 days?

[EssnZilla]

OOB retention for alerts is 90 days and for events its 5 days.

Can these values be increased? what is the affect on performance if i increase the retention period for alerts to 180 days? and event to 30 days?

[robertgeen]

Hello DiscoTom,

It should be fine to retain for more then 90 days just watch the amount of alerts that will build up in the table. At my previous client they had a requirement to have them for 6 months and I confirmed with Development that it was okay as long as they wouldn't be in the millions of records. Hope this helps.

[EssnZilla]

Thanks robertgeen, we have an average of 30K alerts a month and for 6 months (180 days) surely it's not going to cross a million. Is this info.. i.e that alerts can be retained for more than 90 days with limited volume.. mentioned somewhere in the Docs? 

[robertgeen]

Nope I don't think so. Ryan below is from the Ranger Team at ServiceNow so you can take it as the word of the bible when he backs me up on this. Don't touch anything on the em_event table and you will be fine. Think of the alert table as a task table and most of the best practice for growth and such is basically the same so extending to 6 months should be fine. 

Worse comes to worse if you run into issues in the future you can look at copying them over to another table (I was given a document for how to copy them to another table but Dev interrupted that it wasn't a good idea) but at your amount you should be more then okay to let them build for 6 months.

[Ryan Zulli]

for Alerts I'll agree with Robert - however for events, its really not advised to change OOB table rotations. You should create another table and use a scheduled job to copy/move the events over - or you can offload them onto another db.