Managing the Archiving process policies

The AR System Archive Manager console is where you manage the archiving process. To access the AR System Archive Manager console, you must have the role of Archive Admin. When entering values in console fields, you must type numbers that are positive, whole numbers, equal to or greater than 1. You can perform the archiving tasks from the Archive Manager console.

To open the AR System Archive Manager console

Before you can perform the activities described in this topic, you must open the AR System Archive Manager console. 

1. Open the IT Home page.
2. From the Application menu, select AR System Administration > AR System Archive Manager console.
   

To change when a record is ready for archiving

The archiving process uses archiving policies to determine whether a record is ready for archiving. Each record type has its own archiving policy. The archiving policy defines:

• Which record types are archived (Incident requests, change requests, and so on).

• The required record status (Closed, Retired, or Cancelled).

  Important

  The archiving process does not consider when the record was Closed, Retired, or Cancelled. For example, an incident request that was submitted 548 days ago, but was closed only yesterday, is archived during the same archiving run as an incident request that was submitted 548 days ago and closed on the same day. If an incident request was submitted 600 days ago, but closed only yesterday, it is archived in the first archiving run after it is closed.

• When to archive a record, according to the Age in Days value (a reference to how long ago a record was either submitted or last modified), depends on the record type.

For more information on each of the archiving policies, see Archiving.

By using the AR System Archive Manger console, you can change the Age in Days value. When you change this value, you can control how long each record type remains in the production database based on the needs of your organization.

For example, if your help desk generates 30 incident requests for every change request, you might need to archive incident requests more frequently than change requests.

1. From the Archive Policies table, select the policy that you want to edit.

2. In the Age in Days field, type the new value.

   Tip

   If the Age in Days field is not visible in the UI, the policy that you selected is disabled. To enable the policy, make sure the policy is selected in the table, and then click Enable Policy.

3. Click Apply. 
   The value that you have entered is displayed in the Custom Specified Age In Days column. When a value is present in both, the Default Policy Age In Days column and the Custom Specified Age In Days column, the system uses the custom age in days to qualify the records for archiving.
4. If necessary, run an on-demand archive process.
   You might need to run an on-demand archive process if, for example, you reduced the number of days after which a record type is archived. In this case, you might not want to wait for the next archive process to move the newly qualified records out of the production database. 

To resume using the default Number of Days value

To resume using the value specified in the Default Policy Age in Days column, highlight the applicable policy in the Archive Policies table and then click Use system default of x days.

The system removes the value from the Custom Specified Age in Days column and leaves the corresponding table cell blank. When the cell is blank, the archiving process uses the value in the Default Policy Age In Days column to determine when to run the selected archive policy. 

To disable individual archiving policies

You can prevent a specific record type from being archived by disabling its archiving policy. When an archiving policy is disabled, the archiving process ignores the records of the related type when the process runs. When you are ready to start archiving the record type again, you can re-enable the archiving policy.

1. From the Archive Policies table, select the policy that you want to disable.

2. Click Disable Policy.
   The associated cell in the Custom Specified Age In Days column changes to a negative number. A negative number in this cell disables the policy.

To re-enable disabled archiving policies

1. From the Archive Policies table, select the policy that you want to enable.

2. Click Enable Policy.
   The associated cell in the Custom Specified Age In Days column is now blank, which tells the archiving process to resume by using the value in the Default Policy Age In Days column.

   Important

   If you disable an archiving policy that had used a value from the Custom Specified Age In Days column, the system changes the custom value to a negative integer to indicate that the policy was disabled. When you re-enable the policy, the system clears the negative integer from the associated table cell, but leaves it empty. The system does not restore the previous custom Age in Days value. If you still need the archiving policy to reference the custom Age in Days value, you must re-enter the value.

To run an on-demand archive process

If you need to run an archive process outside of the archiving schedule, you can run an on-demand archive process. The on-demand archive processes let you move the data to the archive database by record type. That is, you can run the on-demand archive processes against incident requests, change requests, and so on.

1. From the Archive Policies table, select the record type for which you want to run the on-demand archiving process.

2. Click Run Selected Policy Now.

   Tip

   If the Run Selected Policy Now button is not visible in the UI, the policy that you selected is disabled. To enable the policy, so that you can run an on-demand archive process, make sure the policy is selected in the table, and then click Enable Policy.

To export and delete archive data

Over time, your archive forms will become large as they continue to accumulate archived records. To help you to manage the size of these forms, you can perform the following steps:

• Move the older archived data from the archive forms to a set of .csv files in your system database folder (a separate .csv file is created for each archive form)
• Delete the older archived data. 

You can perform these actions by selecting one of the following export operations:

• Export and Delete—Copies the archived data, which is the same age or older than the Age in Days value to a set of .csv files and then deletes the exported data from the archive form.
• Delete—Deletes archived data, which is equal to or older than the Age in Days value from the archive forms.
• Export—Copies archived data, which is equal to or older than the Age in Days value to the .csv files, but leaves the data on the archive form.

The Age in Days field in the AR System Archive Manager console controls which records are moved or deleted. For example, if you enter 180 in the Age in Days field, all the records that were archived 180 days ago, or longer, are either moved or deleted. How often you can perform an export, depends on the data retention policies of your organization or on the capacity of your system to store the archived data, or both.

• Do not perform the export operation during peak hours or while doing upgrades. Although you can cancel an archiving run after it starts, you cannot cancel and export the operation.
• Exporting and deleting archive data is an asynchronous operation. To trigger the operation, the AR System Archive Manager console creates an entry in the AR System Archived Data Management back end system form. The workflow defined on this form, hands off the job to an internal plug-in that runs in the background. 
• In a server group environment, the export and delete operation runs on the server on which the operation was created. However, if the mid tier is connected to a load balancer, the job could be sent to any of the servers in the group that are behind the load balancer. 
• If you need the export and delete operation to run on a specific server in the group, you must point the mid tier directly to that server before you start the operation.

To export archived data

1. From the Operation menu, select the type of operation that you want the export to perform.

2. Review and if necessary, change the value in the Age in Days field.

3. Click Export.
   The Export function creates a directory under the following path and writes the exported .csv files to that directory:
   <ARInstallationDirectory>/ARServer/Db
   

   Important

   When you see the Export Successfully message, the console is telling you that the export job was successfully submitted to the Archived Data Management backend AR System form. You can monitor the status of the archive job by opening the Archive Data Management form and looking at the Status value.

   To open the Archived Data Management form, type the form's URL in the following format:

   http://<serverName>:<portNumber>/arsys/forms/<serverName>/AR+System+Archived+Data+Management

   The errors, if any, are logged in the arextension.log file located in the <ARInstallationDirectory>/ARServer/Db directory.