Configuring Archived Processes

Overview

Customers can delete and unarchive archived processes in the Process Activity monitor view.

Introduction

Data for processes that have completed (which are no longer needed for auditing or reporting purposes) must be archived regularly. Archiving a process removes it from being used by the process analytics engine.

Users with appropriate access can view the history of an archived process in the Process Activity tab under the Monitor view for auditing purposes.

Archiving a process does not reduce the size of an execution engine file (.kdb) by the same amount of memory previously used by the process. Much of the space freed by archiving the process is reserved as pre-allocated space. New processes that are started use the pre-allocated space before increasing the size of the .kdb file.

This feature has been enabled for Appian Cloud sites created with Appian version 21.1 or later. Appian Cloud customers that do not see archived processes in the Process Activity monitor view should contact Appian Support directly to enable this feature.

Archive process file structure

When a process gets archived, a .l file is created in the <APPIAN_HOME>\server\archived-process directory. The name of the .l file would be something like the following:

• Setting each process model to archive its processes on its own schedule. This is set from the Data Management tab of the Process Model Properties dialog in Appian Designer.
• Allowing the processes to automatically archive based on settings in the Appian CR configuration file.

where 0000e4ee-30a9-8000-acd4-014d98014d98 is the process model UUID and 213758590 is the process ID.

Add the following property to the Appian CR configuration file to define when archived processes will automatically be deleted, both from the Process Activity monitor view, and the .l files themselves:

To enable archived processes in the Process Activity monitor view, add the following to customProperties to the Appian CR configuration file and restart your application:

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spec:
  customProperties:
    appian.feature.isProcessHistoryInKafkaEnabled: "true"

This will populate Process Activity with all existing and all newly archived processes after the site has been restarted.

Mapping Process Activity with archive files

To index the pre-25.2 upgrade .l archived processes on the file system, a one-time create-archive-process-csv.sh script must be run to create a mapping between the Process Activity data and .l files using CSV files that will be automatically imported by the application server. All processes that are archived in 25.2 and above will have the necessary mapping.

To ensure the script is present, make sure that you have pulled the latest image of webapp from our external registry. While your site is running, exec into the webapp pod and execute a command like the following, however updating for your directories:

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$APPIAN_HOME/_admin/_scripts/internal/archive/create-archive-process-csv.sh $APPIAN_HOME/server/archived-process/ /tmp/ $APPIAN_HOME/_admin/shared/archive-process-index/

Once the script finishes, there will be an empty archive-process-csv-complete.txt file created within the same directory. This file is used by the application server to know that the script has been completed successfully, and the generated CSV files can be imported.

The script is safe to rerun should any errors occur, as existing CSV files will be rewritten line by line and new CSV files added, if necessary.

Managing archived processes

Automated archiving

Processes can be archived in the following two ways:

1. Setting each process model to archive its processes on its own schedule. This is set from the Data Management tab of the Process Model Properties dialog in Appian Designer.

2. By default, completed and canceled processes are archived every seven days. This timeframe is defined by adding the following to customProperties in Appian.Spec.

server.conf.exec.AUTOARCHIVE_DELAY=##

Automated archived process deletion

The number of archived processes can rapidly grow with a busy application. Add the following to customProperties in Appian.Spec to define when archived processes will automatically be deleted, both from the Process Activity monitor view, and the .l files themselves. Keep in mind that once the archived processes are deleted, they can never be unarchived.

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server.conf.processcommon.AUTODELETE_ARCHIVES_DELAY_DAYS: "<days>"

where <days> is the number of days after which the system cleans up archived processes.

For example, if you want to clean up and delete all archived processes after 90 days, set the value to 90. For ad-hoc removal, you can manually delete archived processes from Process Activity as well.

For more details about the effects of process archiving, see the Considerations for Archiving Processes page.

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