Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

All,

I've recently discovered nightly NS purging maintenance has been failing. I discovered the InvHist_AeX_SW_Audit_Software Table is 90GB, with 185,729,509 records. I know this is the reason for the purging timeouts, but I'm kind of a loss on how to fix the issue.

Currently NS is set to keep 13months of history on this table. This is something I want to reduce, or even get rid of as from what I've seen history on this table is not something we currently use. We will want to see history of Add Remove Program data but I think that's a different table, correct?

I've been told by one of our DBA's that the time it would take to delete the old records from that table could take weeks? She suggested we select 6 months of data into a new table, truncate the current and then move the new table back in. What do you think?

I guess I'd also like to know exactly what data is being kept here to determine if we could just truncate the entire table, and then set purging accordingly.

Thanks,
Cody

Cody,
We had luck using the ManualPurge.exe attached to AKB 31988. Not sure that you can safely "swap" out the old table data with just the newer rows as your DBA suggested.  It might work, but then again it might not!  I would probably contact Symantec support first to run it by them, or if you're feeling brave, shut down all the ALtiris services, IIS, etc, backup your DB to disk, then proceed.  Then start up the processes again with the now much smaller table in place and see what happens if you run a full inventory from a client machine (after modifying some of the .exes on the machine).  If it doesn't work, you can relatively safely restore the DB back to the prior configuration.

To answer your question, yes Add/Remove history data is stored in a separate table, InvHist_AeX_OS_Add_Remove_Programs.

I would definitely reduce the number of rows/months you keep in that table.

Kyle,

I did see that KB article to run the manual purge. I would try that, but from what the DBA is telling me, it could take a long time. Do you know how much data you purged using he manual purge, and how long it took?

I'm really tempted to drop the entire table and reduce the number of months we keep history. We are getting close to running out of space on the drive because of this. We rarely look at hostorical software data, and even then it's through Add Remove Program data.

Thanks,
Cody

In that case I would probably just disable retaining history on the table from the NS console.  Once that saves (so it will stop writing new history), you can probably proceed with dropping the table.  Again, you may want to contact Symantec support for guidance, or at the least have a good backup at a minimum.  This might also be a good time to review what you're capturing in the Software Audit scan and add additional exclusions to the AuditPls.ini (using AeXAPEdit.exe to edit the file in the \Inventory Solution directory).

Kyle,

Thanks for all your help on this. After talking to Symantec support we did truncate the table. According to Symantec this is something they do fairly often. The truncate table took 1 second to complete.

Thanks,
Cody

Sounds good Cody, glad I could help.