How to effectively preserve work items from Service Manager/Portal
Jason_Meyer
Customer Advanced IT Monkey ✭✭✭
We need a way to preserve work items from Service Manager/Portal. 3-6 months is not long enough to pass audit requirements and so far exporting via Powershell is pretty clunky. Need a way to preserve all content from specified work items for 5-10 years. Anyone have any insight into this?
0
Answers
This can be done via the Admin Panel \ Data retention settings in the portal.
As far as I am aware yes as as all data is linked.
I can go back several years and still access the attachments.
To preserve attachments we wrote a script and runbook that every night replicates all attachments into a SharePoint document library, along with appending the action log with the path to the attachment.
Due to the size of our environment we can only keep 90 days of active work. We also located a management pack that pulls in your action log entries into the ware house for archiving.
@Peter_Settle
Keep in mind that not archiving any work items into the ware house is more then just the cost of disk space. It has more impact on your workflows. It is one of the things I do not live about SCSM design. Close work items will still have workflows run against them. Regardless on the size of your org in time your performance will decrease.
:Thank you Brian_Wiest, this is helpful information. Appears that there are several ways to preserve the data, we are just trying to find the best solution for our needs. Would you be willing to share your script and/or the location/name of the management pack?
We currently have 100k+ active work items in Service Manager/Cireson Portal and am told that our environment is on the large side. We are an organization of 18k staff and are struggling to maintain data in the system that is needed for various requirements. We have enabled 'archiving' at six months after a item is closed and in the mean time are researching preservation options. Hopefully we come up with something before the 'six' months is up.
100k+ Active work. You primary management server must be working overtime to keep workflows running.
Here is a blog to get you started https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/thomase/2014/11/11/extract-files-from-scsm-wi-and-upload-to-sharepoint-online/
Tweak as needed for your environment as we did. Example we do not have it setup for each work item. We in the middle of the night find all matching resolved/completed and copy then.
Here is a blog post of getting your action log into the ware house
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCSM-Action-Logs-user-e2c87c1f
My environment is not as big. ~25k users ~150 support desks ~1k analysts and ~20k work items created per month.
I keep my retention at 90 days for incidents and 60 for service requests. Working as much as I can to keep the service manager DB slim. My biggest issues are configuration items and relationships. Currently working with Microsoft to trim down our tables. Right now my active DB is 50k work items. Working hard to get to SCSM2016 so we can leverage the better ETL processing.
I am running SCSM 2016, but have not really seen much of a difference (positive or negative) in performance. However, I have not disabled ECL for CI's, which seems to be what many (certainly not all) of the Microsoft claims of improved performance are based off of.
The number of work items is not absolute. The main consideration is the number of workflow behind the scenes.
For example, I have one service desk that had a functional requirement for SLAs
So in that, I have to create 6 different queues to separate out their different objectives. And then workflows to start, end, cancel, pause and resume.
So for one function requirement, I placed 6x5=30 workflow processes.
Now if you review this blog about entity processing you can see the timing for processing on the SCSM 2012 R2 farm. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/servicemanager/2016/04/28/improved-entity-processing-in-service-manager-2016/
So for the 50k items in my live database, the 30 workflows check all items to see if they match the rules taking entity processing time.
Then take into account the batch size of your workflows, so far I have left everything at the default of 100. But use a SQL query every so often to monitor the status of the workflow processing. As one thing to keep an eye on is that you also the interval time on each workflow. Almost all are at 60sec.
So, in the end, it depends on your environment and the number of workflows that have the relationship for work items. With SCSM 2012 R2 only your first installed management server performs the workflows. (Thus I do not allow any analysts to use that server) With SCSM 2016 MS changed the workflows so they run across all your management servers. This means if I find that my workflows are starting to lag I can setup another management server that I do not allow analysts to connect to. BTW use a load balancer for console connections. HTH