Activity Journal

[travisg]

Would anyone be able to answer the following questions I have on Journal fields?

This is my first post to the community so apologies if it's a one question per thread.

Is there any performance impact to ServiceNow when more fields are configured to be displayed in the Activity Journal?

I know that there is a system property that you can set on the maximum number of entries to be displayed/retrieved on the form within the activity journal, which the larger the number I'm guessing the longer the response time.

What is the best practice around the amount of fields that should be added to the Journal?

Is there a data retention policy on this table? Are all tracked changes stored indefinitely or do they get cleaned up after x number of years? 

Thanks in advance

[sachin_namjoshi]

Activity journal configured field values are displayed on LOAD of form.

You should show only those fields which your org need and use instead of showing all fields. This will not degrade any performance on loading for form.

1) Journal entries are captured in sys_journal_field

2) History activity are captured in various tables like:

        sys_history_set

        sys_history_line

Some of these are table rotated.You will be able to track all activity journal records in these tables.

Regards,

Sachin

[Allen Andreas · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I would say there would be a negligible performance hit by showing more fields. As in....very very very very low. The data already exists on the server, you're just showing it. I don't think I've ever really worried about that and there's definitely other areas of SN of concern for performance loss than the activity journal.

Best practice would be to show relevant fields that people need to see. If it's optional...and they have access to Context Menu > History...then they can look those up individually, but the activity journal should be limited to what is relevant for quickly understanding the history.

The data retention is permanent and doesn't get cleared unless you archive those incidents/records. They are audited and stay on the instance.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, thanks!