Schedule Historical Data Purges

In the Admin Portal you can schedule a regular automatic data purge task. You can also select the types of data to purge and specify the age at which data purge is triggered.

See Important considerations before purging data before starting a data purge.

Commander performance may be impacted while the data purge task is running. Consider running the purge during a time the system isn't busy (at the end of the wizard, you can choose to run the purge later).

Access:

Tools > Scheduled Tasks

Available to:

Superuser

  1. On the Scheduled Tasks page, click Add.
  2. In the Configure Scheduled Task wizard, select Purge Historical Data, then click Next.
  3. On the Purge Historical Data page, provide a name for the purge task.

    This name can't be edited later.

  4. Select one or more of the following data types:
    • Alerts — Messages generated by Commander when an event or task that has been started requires attention. Alerts are sent out by Commander when a policy has been triggered.
    • Events — Records of activity that have occurred in your virtualized infrastructure. You can see all events that have taken place through the information panel accessed through the historical Events tab.
    • Historical Reporting Data — Events generated before the cloud account was added to Commander; used to produce reports.
    • Tasks — User-initiated actions that appear under the Tasks tab.
    • VM Performance Data — Data that's displayed on the Performance tab for a VM. If you purge this data, performance data for the VMs in your virtualized infrastructure will be set to "unknown" for the relevant dates. For more information, see Monitor Performance of VMs, Hosts, Clusters
    • Billing Records — Records of current VM costs, generated nightly from values entered in cost models. Billing records are also generated automatically for retrieved historical events. Billing records form the basis for reports such as the Cloud Billing report for private cloud accounts. For more information, see Configure Cost Models.
  5. From Purge all data older than, specify the age at which data purge is triggered.

    You can specify only one age trigger per scheduled task. To specify different ages for different data types, create multiple scheduled tasks.

  6. On the Scheduling page, select the frequency at which you want the data purge to occur, then specify the recurrence values for the chosen frequency:
    • Once — The task will occur only once on a specified time and day, then the task will be removed from the Scheduled Tasks list after it has been run. In the Recurrence area, select a time of day and date for the task to occur.
    • Daily — The task will occur each day of the week.
    • Weekly — The task will occur for the selected days of the week.
    • Weekdays — The task will occur daily Monday-Friday.
    • Monthly — The task will only occur one day a month.
    • Week Day of Month — The task will occur for the chosen days of just one month each week.

      If you select 31 for Day of Month for a monthly frequency, Commander automatically adjusts the day to reflect the last day of any given month. The same adjustment is made if you select 29 or 30 for February.

  7. On the Summary page, review the details and click Finish.

    The data purge appears in the list of scheduled tasks.