Activities data available in archive?

Jason_Meyer

We just had an internal audit and realized that we don't have date attributes on our Activities in our SSRS reports.

Does anyone know if the following attributes are available in Archive for Manual Activities?

Scheduled Start Date

Scheduled End Date

Actual Start Date

Actual End date

The only date fields I see on "Manual Activity Detail" are:

Report Generated

Created Date

We need to prove with documentation the date an Activity was completed.

Any thoughts/ideas?

Thanks!

Justin_Workman

@Jason_Meyer - All properties on MAs are archived including these date properties you're looking for. The challenge you will face is reporting from the archive as each object (activity in this case) is stored in JSON in its record. The archiver was meant to serve as a source of viewing individual records rather than reporting on trends etc. Having said that, the Scheduled and Actual start and end dates should also be in the existing Analytics db in the SM_WorkItem_ManualActivity table.

Jason_Meyer

Thanks Justin, I'll share this with our dev. staff.

I'm not trying to look at trends, just need to know the completed dates on Activities that have been archived.

Is this information available from within Service Portal on Cireson's new 'everything is saved' version?

Justin_Workman

Yes. Once the work item is groomed out of SCSM, it is still available in the portal because of the archiver.

Jason_Meyer

Awesome, thanks.

Jason_Meyer

OK, we modified the Activities report that we have running in SSRS against our work item archive and now have these dates. Looks like some of the timestamps are showing in Local Time Zone and some showing in UDT?

Can someone point me to any documentation on the Analytics Archiver, not finding anything with any screenshots on how this looks or works?

Matt_Howard1

From the Knowledge Base: https://kb.cireson.com/article/how-to-cireson-analytics/1360

How to install, dashboards, settings, etc.

Jason_Meyer

Thanks Matt, that helps but appears to be for the older 'analytics' pages. What I'm looking for is where "Analytics Archiver" is installed where analysts can find/display ticket information that was in the past groomed off. Like, attachments, action log updates, history. Our organization is anxiously looking forward to being able to pull that information from our older tickets, we are also concerned about how large the storage needs will be. We currently keep seven years of tickets in our archive and expecting that storage to grow by quite a bit.

After we install 11.6.3 do we just use the Service Portal 'search' at the top of the portal to always find these tickets?

Thanks again.

Matt_Howard1

I believe that is correct. The archiver is a new function of the portal, but the data resides in the Analytics database. It will allow groomed tickets to still be searchable and visible in the portal, but with an additional tag of 'Archived'. That is one of the nice things that I am excited about Analytics and Archiver is that it will replace the SM data warehouse (at least for our use case).

Matt_Howard1

Here's the blog post from the release announcement that I think has more of the info you are looking for: https://cireson.com/blog/cireson-portal-for-service-manager-v11-5-and-analytics-archiver/

Jason_Meyer

We have Analytics Archiver enabled in our test environment and so far it looks extremely valuable to our analysts trying to find info from older items. We have pushed it to Production and are anxiously looking forward to the future when these tickets remain in the scope of search. Great feature Cireson.

One discovery, we are currently not seeing HISTORY tab information on these 'archived' tickets. Click on SHOW HISTORY and nothing happens.

Tickets may have been created prior to 'analytics archiver' being installed/enabled, not sure if that is it or a bug?

Simon_Zeinhofer

@Jason_Meyer How long is your history retention period?

Might it be, that the history got already groomed out before the work items are archived by the archiver?