Can Helpdesk 6.0 archive old incidents?

Article:HOWTO49686  |  Created: 2011-04-13  |  Updated: 2011-08-04  |  Article URL
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Can Helpdesk 6.0 archive old incidents to remove them from the Helpdesk database, such as to help improve performance or timeout issues?


Helpdesk has no out of box ability to archive incidents. Note: ServiceDesk 7.x also does not, which is the current ticket system offered by Symantec.


Helpdesk should not need to have incidents archived as it can handle many thousands of incidents. This then falls into two different reasons why this is wanted:

  1. Helpdesk is performing slowly or experiencing timeout issues. These are most likely not caused by a large number of incidents. The following article discusses these issues in more detail:

    Slow performance, timeouts, out of memory errors or high CPU/w3wp.exe/IIS usage occurs when using Helpdesk
  2. Old incidents are simply no longer wanted in the system. There are three methods of removing these:

    a. From a Helpdesk worker console, go to Incidents > Delete Incidents. Specify the necessary criteria to remove unwanted incidents, such as a date range. An extreme variation of this is to delete the contents of the workitem table in the Altiris_Incidents database. This will delete all incidents and should only be done if no prior incidents and their history are desired to be kept.

    b. Make a backup of the Helpdesk database and then restore this onto a different Notification Server to be used as the "archival" server. (This would require a separate server and database for the Notification Server and Helpdesk other than the production databases.) Then, using step 2a, delete unwanted incidents from the production server. The archival server could then be accessed to view old incidents. Note: The archival server would not be able to interact with the production server, such as if old archived incidents were wanted to be put back into an open status on the production server, as they are physically different systems. 

    c. A new method to "archive" incidents has been created. This is documented here:

    How to archive incidents in Helpdesk


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