If you’ve spent any amount of time in Microsoft System Center Service Manager (SCSM), you have no doubt interacted with Service Manager’s “grooming” settings. These settings define the amount of time a closed “work item” remains in SCSM before it’s groomed out, never to be seen again. In fact, the only way to retrieve historical “work item” information is to either:
- Keep “data retention” settings abnormally high to avoid grooming for as long as possible. You may need to do this to:
- Help auditors quickly view “work items” while meeting auditing requirements.
- Allow analysts to quickly look up old “work items” and find specific “comments,” “file attachments” or “resolution details.”
- Both of these situations come with a performance tradeoff. Similar to Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM), the more data you keep, the slower the system performs. People can find what they need, but they will have to sacrifice speed to locate data. The less data you keep, the faster the system runs. But you may be tapped on the shoulder and asked, “Why can’t I find IR875432?”
- Write SQL queries against the Microsoft Service Manager Data Warehouse or Cireson Analytics:
- The SCSM Data Warehouse comes with its own administrative overhead: it is sensitive to changes and doesn’t let you back out “management pack” changes. It doesn’t keep “action logs,” “comments” or “file attachments.”
- Cireson Analytics deploys alongside the portal. In contrast, data is regularly available for querying, it is possible to back out of all “management pack” changes, and it keeps “comments” but doesn’t keep “file attachments.”
With that said, it’s time to talk about one of our most anticipated features now available in v11.5 on the “latest” branch: “analytics archiver.” It gives you the ability to download “file attachments,” view “comments,” interrogate the “action log,” and overall take Service Manager performance to new levels of excellence.
Analytics Archiver
With the latest round of enhancements for Analytics, you can now improve Service Manager performance, save and retrieve everything listed above for analysts and auditors alike—without writing a single line of SQL. And you can do it all with a single checkbox during setup.
But if you’d rather wait, you can always head over to the portal’s “settings” page, flip to “true,” and then restart “cache builder” when you’re ready.
That’s it! Just continue to work in the portal as you have previously, and we will take care of the rest. Now when “work items” get groomed out of Service Manager, they’ll be waiting in “analytics” along with their respective:
- File Attachments
- Action Log
- History
- End User + Analyst comments
When you navigate to a “work item” in the portal, we’ll first check to see if it’s available for editing. If it’s not, we’ll pull it from “analytics” for you. For example, let’s say I went to an old “incident” link for IR3637. Whether it comes from a fellow employee or from Operations Manager we can see:
Incident was Closed, Archived, and cannot be edited
View the Action Log
View the entire History
The best thing about all of this is that you no longer need to understand the nuance of whether a “work item” has been groomed. Just go to the “work item” page to access everything you want—whenever you need it.
Cireson Analytics helped you report faster than ever.
With Cireson Analytics Archiver, you can have a living data warehouse seen through the lens of the portal!
Download Cireson Portal for SCSM v11.5 now!
