What is the best practice for setting up data archiving and data deletion?

Chas · ‎01-27-2022

We are looking to set up data archiving and data deletion across all our instances and I am seeking some best practices and ideas from other Service Now users. Below are some considerations we would like to adopt in any policies:

Cloning instances - how much data is actually needed in sub-prod instances? Can we setup 30 days of data during a clone, or does each instance need its own set of delete policies each time a clone is performed?
Compliance to FCA and other data legislations (Rather than keeping data for 7 years, can we archive most of the 7 years? Or does it need to be kept unarchived?)
Mapping all of the 7,000+ tables into a Service Now archiving/delete policy. How is this best achieved? Can archiving groups be setup and then have tables assigned to a group? Is there an easy way to see storage consumption by table/package etc? Does archived data consume less storage than retained unarchived data?
Process to automatically add new tables resulting from new apps/upgrades into a archive group. What is the best way to identify new tables being installed during an upgrade etc?

Any other good practices and ideas would be welcome.

Thanks.

Chaz.

bammar · ‎01-27-2022

Hi Chaz,

I have been an admin/developer for 8 years and I cant really say best practices but i follow a pragmatic approach. 80% of all results only require 20 % effort. No use putting energy to things that have low utility and low benefit.

Archiving - Candidates for archiving are - Tables like incidents that grow beyond 1 million records. Performance on queries starts to suffer, loading lists, scripts etc suffers. Consider in instance 5 years old and Incident is now surpassing 1 million records- The organization most likely already reported on everything they need to for years 1 and 2 already- do they really need to see the simple pw reset incidents from 5 yrs ago? I think for the 7 Yr standard question- it doesnt matter where you keep it as ong as you keep it- think about it- Some companies dont have ServiceNow , they have spreadsheets or worse PAPER! so being in ServiceNow as an archive as opposed to in the live table is semantics.
Methods - Work with certain Groups who worked the tickets and set up archiving policy appropriately = Maybe the group that does PW resets will allow a policy of archiving any PW reset incidents 6 months or older- while another group say Legal will say - we only get 100 tickets a yr and we need ours in Prod- you leave those in there. So basically you find practical groups of tickets and timeframes worked out with the stakeholders and you set it and ServiceNow autoarchives.
Deletion - I would NEVER delete anything unless i really had to. I think Archive is the savior for those who dont want to delete- Archiving creates an another table that correspponds to the original and stores the archived records there- I never detected latency and ServiceNow never said hey you have too many records and our storage cant handle it or something like that. Deletion also goes against record keeping standards for say Medical or Schools.
Tables- Focus on Archiving records from tables with alot of records- If say the Demand Table only has 600 records after 8 years there is no real need to archive- ideally we can search all as needed from that table. I wouldnt even think of archiving 98 percent of the tables in ServiceNow- some system tables have auto- archiviing/deletion processes and i leave those alone...
If you totally remodel a customized application or area- you could archive the old records as part of that project
Auditing- this may necessitate the need to fetch records from the past so only Delete if you have no choice in my opinion
Clones- These are already streamlined in terms of the data- for instance by default Clones dont copy attachments, they also I beleive have 90 days of records and you can change that . I have no care in the world how many GIGs my instances hold on ServiceNows Servers haha As long as Customers are happy, ServiceNow hosts are happy, I am happy

View solution in original post

Rachel Gomez · ‎12-18-2022

Go to Admin >> General Settings >> Data Deletion and Archiving.

Select the Enable scheduled data deletion option.

Use the criteria/rules section to set the criteria for the scheduled deletion.

Regards,

Rachel Gomez

angel kumari · ‎01-07-2024

Suppose i have to create archive rule to incident ,change and problem then what shoud be table nm task or its separate use like as incident, prob, and chang