question Clear log entry? in Developer forum

Clear log entry?

georgechen — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:35:43 GMT

Hi folks

I have just been asked by my colleague who is experimenting Credit Card Regex test to find out records with credit card number pattern. The sys_log has been written for testing but he wonders if the logs can be cleared?

Thanks,

Re: Clear log entry?

sergiu_panaite — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 09:00:28 GMT

Hi George,

By default table syslog is a rotated table (System Definition -> Table Rotations) with a default configuration of 8 rotations, 7 days each. This means it only stores data for 56 days, and it's cleaned automatically.

Table Rotation - ServiceNow Wiki

If you really need to have the table cleaned now, you will probably have to open an incident to ServiceNow support.

Regards,

Sergiu

Re: Clear log entry?

Kalaiarasan Pus — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 09:15:40 GMT

If it just for temporary purpose, you can open the delete ACL on syslog table and remove the 'nobody' role from 'Require Roles' related list. That should make the delete button visible. Add the 'nobody' role back to the ACL once done.

I am sure ServiceNow will not recommend doing it.

Re: Clear log entry?

Deepak Ingale1 — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 12:58:40 GMT

Hi George,

I did clear some log statements using background scripts in developer instance in past.

That worked perfect for me. But seriously I dont know the implications of performing this operation in live prod instance.

the code which I used was something like

var deleteObj = new GlideRecord('syslog');

var encodedQry = "Encoded query should go here";

deleteObj .addEncodedQuery(encodedQry);

deleteObj.query();

gs.print(deleteObj.getRowCount());

Run this much of code only for 1st time to see how many records are returned for deletion purpose.

Once you see that records are under control and only count matches to your encoded query filter, you can go on and delete those by using below code.

var deleteObj = new GlideRecord('syslog');

var encodedQry = "Encoded query should go here";

deleteObj .addEncodedQuery(encodedQry);

deleteObj.query();

while(deleteObj.next()){

deleteObj.deleteRecord();

}

Note: Please check if this has any cons using this operation.

pradeepksharma, rfedoruk bernyalvarado

Any comments are much appriciated.

Re: Clear log entry?

sergiu_panaite — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 13:25:41 GMT

Deepak,

If you need to delete million or records, using GlideRecord is not the fastest way.

If you don't need to full syslog shard (the active table from Rotations for syslog) then you can just ask ServiceNow to truncate it for you. It's much faster and no real performance impact on the production instance (but you will lose all records from the table).

If you need only to delete based on a particular criteria (like the encoded query) you can use GlideRecord deleteMultiple (GlideRecord - ServiceNow Wiki ), but again, if you have millions of records is not going to be very fast. Even so, impact over the instance should not be high.

Regards,

Sergiu

Re: Clear log entry?

VigneshMC — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 14:32:10 GMT

You can try below script to delete all entries in the table, it's faster than using gliderecord

gs.sql('truncate <table>');

source:http://www.servicenowelite.com/blog/2014/2/14/deletion-methods

Re: Clear log entry?

bernyalvarado — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 14:44:59 GMT

Hi George,

I hope you're doing great!

Perhaps one small thing to add to the list of great comments you already got is that it is a good idea to avoid doing any type of gs.log() on the server side scripts. Unless it's used temporarily for debugging in a development instance, it's better to avoid using log messages for various reasons like:

a) ensure an agile troubleshooting process in production with only relevant log information

b) avoid any type of performance degradation

c) exposing any type of sensitive information

There may be few scenarios where it might make sense to keep logs message in production, specially for scenarios where there might be an issue that it can't be reproduced in other environment; still, these should be treated as a temporary measure until the root cause of the problem is understood.

It's also important to keep in mind that gs.log statements in the service side script will appear in the ServiceNow ACE report which audits the best practices applied in an implementation.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Berny

Re: Clear log entry?

bernyalvarado — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 14:49:20 GMT

Keep in mind this is a production instance. Doing a gs.sql in a production instance is way too risky. If it's ever needed, It's better to leave this responsibility to the ServiceNow support team .

Thanks,

Berny

Re: Clear log entry?

georgechen — Sat, 19 Dec 2015 22:35:16 GMT

Thanks a lot Berny. This is actually our non-prod environment, we might just forgo the log cleanning, however it good to know about the best time to use gs.log

Re: Clear log entry?

Simran Shidvank — Wed, 20 May 2020 12:17:03 GMT

Hi Kalaiarasan,

Thanks for the solution.

Actually, I tried by removing 'nobody' role from ACL. But after deleting logs, we can not add 'nobody' role again to that ACL.

Thanks,

Simran