Best practice for the Persistence Options in the Controller settings?

Question

What is a reasonable minimum time frame to retain queue, results, and completed schedules for in the Persistence Options in the Controller settings in a production environment?

* https://help.alteryx.com/20211/server/controller#:~:text=to%20the%20database.-,Persistence%20Options,-The%20database%C2%A0maintains

For example, I have a customer with a setting of 90 days.

However, their MongoDB is quite large and causing some issues during upgrades.

Is 60 days a valid option here?

What considerations might I be missing when increasing or decreasing this value other than the amount of memory being used?

JonathanAllenby · Answer

Thanks for your input!

That KB is actually what started me down this path of looking for best practice.

This pretty much matches the summary I came to:

60 days SHOULD be fine as long as the workflow outputs are actually outputting somewhere and not just sitting in the Gallery waiting to be downloaded OR they're getting downloaded and used for whatever their purpose is as soon as the results are ready.

The only other point I came up with was if they need to look at the historical runtime logs they'll lose the ability to do so in the 60-90 day window without cracking open a backup open. Normally I don't think they'd ever need to do this but it's a point to be made regardless.

fmvizcaino · Answer

Hey @JonathanAllenby ,

That is really dependable on your company's needs I would say. Alteryx suggests 180 days but that may vary depending on the audit trails you want to have.

I guess the uploaded files you could limit to 60 days or less since these are inputs for analytical apps and users tend to use new files every execution or on a monthly basis.

The results after X amount of days will grow depending on how your developers are building the outputs of your workflows and training them to point the workflow to a shared folder other than making the file available on the gallery could be enough to decrease the size.

Other than that, I suggest reading this post to check how to decrease mongoDB's size when using these set of options.

https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-Server-Knowledge-Base/How-to-shrink-the-size-of-the-embedded-Mongo-database/ta-p/501114

Best regards,

Fernando Vizcaino