Blue Prism Session logs Archival issue - Available storage options

[SrinivasGoripar]

Dear Fellow Members,

I am reaching out to you to get some insights and best practices for handling Session logs / Database archive for Blue Prism Database.

The Archival feature provided in Blue Prism Control room is archiving the information to the local folder space. Even after running the archive from Control room, Session logs size seems not reduced greatly (only archived 100 MB from few GB space in Database). 

Can some one take time to provide help on the below questions please?

1. What are the options available to store it to cloud storage (say Amazon S3 etc.) instead of Local disk. If this is not feasible is there any other effective way to archive?

2. Archival feature seems archived only certain amount of Data from the available logs structure in Control room. The archived folder occupied ~100 MB size on disk. However Database Contains the data in few GB for Session logs.

 Thanks in advance for your time to take a look into my query!

Regards,
Srini

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Srinivas Goriparti
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[andrew.beard · Accepted solution]

Hi Srini,

Two documents that I'd recommend you have a look at are the Portal>Documents>Documentation

• Maintaining a Blue Prism Database Server

• Data Gateways (this is the latest version but it was introduced in V6.5)

As for where to store the Session logs.... ultimately anywhere that's secure, but cost is obviously a major factor. This data is typically accessed for dashboard/statistical reporting or compliance purposes, but how you use the data is going to impact on where is best to store it.

Just be mindful (you're already on the correct path by enquiring about this topic) that BP is an operational database, so the "leaner" the database the better performant the BP application will be. Archiving session logs and other tables that grow over time is a great way of achieving this. Many customers monitor their database table size growth and if they detect a spike in growth this usually indicates an anomaly somewhere, such as a process needlessly looping or high logging levels being set on an automation that has recently moved to a production environment.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards

Andrew

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Andrew Beard
Senior Consultant
Blue Prism
Australia/Melbourne
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[SrinivasGoripar]

Thank you Andrew for your inputs.

I ran the Sql reports for disk space utilization and Session Logs table still occupy pretty good amount of space in Sql (this has been verified by Top Table Size report)

At the same time, I do not have any more logs to archive or I could not retrieve Logs for a Item Key from Blue Prism Control room. This corresponds to the meaning that all available Session Logs were archived.

But in reality those records still occupy space in the Database. Does the Archive feature available in Blue Prism remove the entries from Database after a successful archive?

When I query the Database (Count(*) from Session log table it shows record count as almost the same. This confuses me if it actually removes the session logs or not.

If not what are the best alternatives available to remove them as a Blue Prism Solutions Developer.

thanks,

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Srinivas Goriparti
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[andrew.beard]

Hi Srinivas,

The in product Archive feature relies on a runtime resource being assigned to actually perform the archival process. Has this been set and if so, does this resource have spare capacity to perform the archiving when it's not running other processes?

A couple of other sources of information the in product help on archiving may be of use - here

Also a series of knowledge articles on the topic in the Portal>Support center may prove useful - here

Let me know if you're still encountering problems.

Thanks

Andrew

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Andrew Beard
Senior Consultant
Blue Prism
Australia/Melbourne
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[SrinivasGoripar]

Thank you very much Andrew for the links provided and explanation. Much appreciated!
I will explore further and reach out if any other issues.
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Srini

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Srinivas Goriparti
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