Hello, UiPath Community!
Some of your inquiries regarding Orchestrator cloud accounts overall performance have been heard. We acknowledge the need for a faster environment, in which operations happen in the blink of an eye.
In order to achieve this goal of ensuring better performance for job processing in the cloud we intend to offload old and processed historical data from the operational database, allowing us to optimize for high volume workloads.
For that, we will be introducing Data Retention and Archiving policies for jobs in Orchestrator, which ensures built-in data off-loading capabilities. We are relying on your collaboration to strengthen operational performance of your cloud Orchestrator.
This change will impact all Automation Cloud organizations, please read carefully.
The implementation for data retention and archiving policies is broken down into three phases, giving you enough time to be informed and to plan your next steps:
Implementation phases
- Phase 0 is a pre-deployment phase, in which we inform all Automation Cloud organizations about the upcoming policies, how your account is impacted, the feature behavior and the rollout mechanism. At the end of phase 0, the feature UI and functionality will be deployed to all cloud environments, but no policy will be activated.
- Phase 1 is a 4 week period of time between the policies deployment and their activation, giving you the time to adjust and prepare your processes. Worry not that you may overlook preparing your account before the policies live date, as an Application Information counter will display the remaining days until retention policies start applying. We will also provide a link to the feature documentation, in which you’ll find guidelines about the available policy configuration options. At the end of phase 1, all policies, either the default one or the ones you configured, are applied.
- Phase 2 means policies become active and your cloud account data is offloaded based on their configuration. Phase 2 has no end date. This means that if you configure a new policy, it will apply immediately.
Targeted Resources
The policies are applied to the jobs (and related job events) of the associated process.
That means all the processes in your tenant will be mapped to a Data Retention Policy (the default one or the one you configured), and this policy applies to the corresponding jobs.
Associated execution media such as screenshots and recordings are always deleted when jobs are subject to retention policies.
The policy mechanism
Here are some highlights to bear in mind when you prepare your jobs for data offload:
- You can configure the policy via:
- The UI during process creation or process update.
- A new API called Process-Retention , allowing you to configure the policy programmatically.
- You can choose a maximum of 180 days as the retention duration;
- Of course you can choose a lower duration, but it cannot be higher than 180 days. That’s six months.
- The duration determines how long we keep your jobs after their execution ended.
- Only jobs in final states will be subject to the policy, this includes those in status Faulted, Successful, Stopped
- A background job will be regularly checking jobs and their policy and take the necessary actions.
- Jobs affected by the policy can be either deleted or archived, depending on what you choose as the outcome:
- If you set the policy to Delete , all jobs having ended for more than the specified duration will be removed.
- If you set the policy to Archive , all jobs having ended for more than the specified duration will be archived into an existing storage bucket, that is NOT read-only.
To put it briefly, you must create or use an existing non read-only storage bucket with the main purpose of holding your jobs archive, and then select it.
- One storage bucket can be used to archive jobs from different processes
- You can use the Orchestrator built-in storage bucket functionality for this purpose, as well as your own external storage bucket.
- To retrieve the archived information, simply access the archive files from the designated storage bucket. We will publish the format and structure used subsequently in our documentation.
- The Default Policy for old processes keeps your jobs for 120 days and then deletes them. Be careful, as you cannot undo deletion.
- The Default Policy for newly created processes after phase 1 rollout keeps your job for 30 days and then deletes them. Be careful, as you cannot undo deletion.
- Job events will be included within the archive, while execution media such as screenshots and recordings will not be included and deleted.
- We will be also rolling out a asynchronous Job export functionality you can use via the UI or API to ensure your data is extracted.
- Jobs belonging to deleted processes will be subject to the default Default Policy.
- Policy output will NOT affect data synchronization towards UiPath Insights. That is, any board containing the archived or deleted jobs will still be valid and contain their information in accordance with the Insights data retention policy.
Your collaboration
We do have a default policy of 30 days + deletion, but you are not bound to use it. However, you are bound to set a retention policy. You can use the Orchestrator UI or API to configure your own retention policy, based on your business requirements.
In case our default policy does the trick for you, then you’re all set, and you don’t have to do anything specific from this point onward.
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