Cleaning up TrueSight Server Automation data

As you use the various functions in TrueSight Server Automation (such as compliance analysis, patch analysis, provisioning, deployments, or snapshots), data is generated for the corresponding jobs and objects. This data gets stored in the TrueSight Server Automation database and file server, and it accumulates over time. It is a good practice to regularly delete the data that has accumulated, provided that you do not need it for historical or reporting purposes. A database cleanup involves removing TrueSight Server Automation data that you no longer need, based on the age of the data (that is, data is deleted when it exceeds a retention period that you define).

Not performing database cleanup regularly can result in the following issues:

• Database size increases with old data and quickly uses up the allocated disk space.
• The TrueSight Server Automation user interface starts suffering from degradation in performance.
• Attempting to perform a database cleanup after neglecting to do so for a long time can result in the cleanup process taking a long time, and might require longer downtime of your TrueSight Server Automation environment.

By periodically removing unused data, you ensure that the database size is maintained, TrueSight Server Automation performance is better, and successive cleanups complete faster.

TrueSight Server Automation offers two mechanisms for database cleanup:

• Online database cleanup — An out-of-the-box Network Shell script and Network Shell Script Job are available that call various BLCLI cleanup commands from the Delete namespace. You can configure and schedule this job to run in typical mode to perform a combination of several cleanup operations. Alternatively, you can customize multiple copies of the job and set each separate job to run an individual cleanup operation. You can also use the Maintenance Server and schedule automatic cleanups. For details, see Scheduling-the-automatic-data-cleanup.
• Offline database cleanup — A more performant cleanup utility that requires temporarily shutting down the TrueSight Server Automation Application Server. You can use this utility in cases where you have accumulated an exceptionally large amount of data in the database. If cleanup has not been running regularly, this is the preferred tool to "catch up" on cleanup before scheduling online cleanup or upgrading to a newer version of the product.

Before you start the cleanup process, it is recommended to check the state of your database. For various methods to do this, see Determining-the-state-of-the-database-before-or-during-cleanup.