Data Retention Policies

Totango DNA-CX platform expands its data retention capability to support out-of-the-box entity retention policy. This will allow Totango operation engineers to define the data retention policy which best suite their company and technology.

This feature allows global admins to set up a policy to delete data from Totango, be cautious of data loss when configuring any retention policy.    

Value

• Make Totango operation engineers more efficient and save their time by managing data entities deletion in a self-service manner.
• Save customer engineering development and implementation time by supporting full data sets uploads (snapshots) on a daily basis.
• Make the Totango system more secure and aligned with the customer security definitions by letting admin control the backup files retention policy  

Use Cases

• As a global admin, I am able to define retention policy for every data entity in Totango.
  
  The deletion settings are based on entity inactivity which means that Totango did not get any new information about this entity.
  For example, if the admin defined that “Accounts” should be deleted after 1 day of inactivity, it means that Totango will mark all accounts with no new information in the last 1 day, and will delete it.
  
  
  
  What is ”inactivity” or ”no information” means:

• No attribute was uploaded/sent
• No usage activity was logged
• No touchpoint was logged via API
• No tasks were created/completed via API

The retention policy definition is activated immediately after setting it up and saving it. It means that Totango will start marking the last information update for all entities (starting at this point), and the inactive ones will be deleted in the next Totango daily process after reaching the inactive days number set in the policy.

For example, today I defined a retention policy to delete accounts after 3 days of inactivity. All accounts last activity will be set to today and will be updated on a daily basis. once an account is reached 3 days of inactivity it will be deleted.

You can select one of the out-of-the-box deletion timeframes or select your own timeframe by just typing the number of inactivity days.

• As an admin, I am able to define the retention policy of my company free accounts.
  In case your company has a freemium program, in order to clean your customer base, use the free accounts retention policy to expire and delete irrelevant free accounts.
  
  Note, free accounts are part of the account entity, therefore the account entity deletion policy overrules free account expiration deletion policy. Therefore whenever the account entity deletion happens sooner than the free accounts policy, the free accounts will be deleted based on the accounts entity retention policy.
  For example, I defined the account entity retention policy to be “delete after 3 days of inactivity” and the free account retention policy to be “delete after 30 days of inactivity”. Since free accounts are part of the account entity, free accounts will be deleted after 3 days.
  
  

• Totango stores backup files for recovery and processing of past data. Currently, backup files are stored in the Customer Data Hub backup folder to enable download historical files and in the DNA-CX backup folder to enable historical calculations of metrics and health. The backup file retention policy will enable you to define how much time you allow Totango to keep files for backup.
  Past data files are stored for these purposes:

  • Customer Data hub backup data enables download of historical files
  • DNA-CX Backup data enables past calculations like Metric and rollup recalculation, past health recalculations, and past data processing calculations. In addition, these backups are used to past data analysis for Support issues and RCAs
  • DNA-CX Operational data enables the user to see and analyze past data in real-time including metrics and rollup change and usage aggregations. The operational data is stored in Elastic Search, DB, and Operational files
    
    As an admin, I am able to define a backup file retention policy and determine the number of days I allow Totango to save Customer Data Hub backup files and DNA-CX backup files.
    

    
    Based on the backup files retention policy, backup data will be deleted after a successful processing but not operational data.

    Backup data file deletion implications are:
  • Historical recalculation of data can occur ONLY for timeframes defined in the policy.
  • Metric and rollup recalculation can occur ONLY for timeframes defined in the policy.
  • CDH downloads of historical files can occur ONLY for timeframes defined in the policy.
  • Support deep analysis and RCAs can occur ONLY for timeframes defined in the policy
  • View and analyze past data in real-time for any attribute, metric, custom metric, and rollup will not effect by the backup file retention policy .
  • Metrics, rollups, and usage aggregations relative change versus a previous period for 1d, 3d, 7d, 14d, 30d, 90d, 180d relative periods will not effect by the backup file retention policy.

Where To Find It?

The data retention policies are defined in the data retention page under global settings.

How To Configure It?

Open data retention page.

Review all the entities in the page, and define the retention policy for every one of them.
You can pick the number of inactive days from the dropdown, or type the number of days.

Make sure to define your desired setting for each entity.

Save your configuration.


You can reset all the retention policies to system defaults by clicking “Reset to default settings”

Important Notes

• Whenever an account is deleted, its users and collections will be deleted as well.

• When the Retention Policy is set to delete accounts after X days of inactivity, if the Parent accounts have X days inactivity then along with the Parent account, its sub-accounts will get deleted as well as part of the retention policy.

• Whenever a new collection is defined, it will inherit its retention policy from the account level. 
• If the entity was deleted by mistake, in the first 30 days (the “revive period”), you can revive it by sending new information about it. This action will unmark it as deleted and will revive it.
  After the “revive period” you cannot revive the entity, and any new information about this entity will re-create it as a new entity.
  
• When an admin moves an account to the “junk” list, this account is deleted immediately and it is filtered forever. It means that any new information about this account will not recreate it.
  
  
  
  
• When 'Junking' an account, there is a grace period of up to 20 minutes in which you can restore the account with all of its information.
  After the grace period, accounts will be visible in the UI after restoring them only if new information was sent to re-create these accounts in Totango.

 For more information, reach out to your CSM.