Archiving ObserveIT Data

ObserveIT has built-in database archiving capabilities, to move data from the main ObserveIT database to a secondary database. Storing obsolete and irrelevant data online reduces the overall performance of a database server.

To minimize performance problems that are caused by maintaining excess data, you can implement an archiving strategy. By archiving data, you can decrease disk space usage and reduce the maintenance required, for example in defragmentation, backup and restore procedures. From a performance point of view, if a production database or file system storage has obsolete data that is never or rarely used, query execution can be time-consuming because queries also scan obsolete data. To improve query performance, you should move obsolete data from the production database/file system to another archive database/file system.

Archiving of data can also be performed on file systems that are used for storing screen capture data.

Archiving jobs can be launched manually or can be scheduled for automatic periodic archive rotation. The archive data can be split into daily transactions, thus enabling an even larger volume of data to be archived.

You can choose to exclude users/endpoints from archiving so that user activity data that you may need for further investigation is not archived and deleted. The excluded data is available from the Web console diaries, alerts, search and reports.

Important Considerations for Archiving Data

Before you begin to configure archiving, you should be aware of the following considerations:

An archive job always uses the most recently created archive database. As soon as the new archive database is created by the SQL Server administrator, ObserveIT will begin using it. The previously used archived database and its session contents will still be accessible for restore and replay.

If you are using the file system to store your recorded sessions' screenshot images, when archiving is configured, a file system will be used to store the images. When images are stored in the database, the database will be used for the archived images. When restoring archived sessions, the images that belong to the sessions will be restored to their original file folder.

After specific sessions are archived, they will no longer occupy space in the production database/file system. These archived sessions will also no longer appear in the Endpoint or User Diary, or in the Search or Report results. The only way to replay the archived sessions will be to use the Diary tab of the Configuration > Archive page.

During archiving, the ObserveIT database/file system storage is locked. Although efforts have been made to minimize the lock time, it is recommended that you schedule the archive to be performed when activity on the server is minimal (for example, weekends, nights). It is also recommended to schedule the archive so that each archive does not contain too much data; that is, it is better to schedule a periodic archive, than to archive a whole year at once.

The following topics describe: