Overview
Purging policy in Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) permanently deletes tracked transaction data from the SQL database after a configured retention period. You can set a different purging policy for each business transaction, allowing you to retain data for longer on critical transactions and purge high-volume transactions more aggressively.
Business value
Without a purging policy, tracked transaction and stage instance data accumulates indefinitely in your SQL database, increasing storage costs and degrading query performance over time. Configuring retention periods per transaction keeps your database lean and ensures tracking queries remain fast.
How it works
Each business transaction has its own purging policy setting. The default retention period is 180 days. All tracked transaction instances and stage instances older than the configured retention period are automatically deleted from the customer's SQL table for that transaction.
The maximum retention period depends on your hosting type: 180 days for SaaS and 730 days for private hosting.
You can reduce the retention period if you need data removed sooner. The business transaction configuration itself is not affected by purging. Only the tracked instance data is deleted.
When you delete a business process or transaction, the data is soft-deleted. Turbo360 background jobs run daily to permanently remove soft-deleted data.
Steps
Use the following steps to configure the purging policy for a business transaction. Navigate to Business Activity Monitoring > Business Processes, then open the transaction you want to configure.
Configure purging policy
Setting a purging policy controls how long tracked instance data is retained for a transaction before it is permanently deleted.
- Open the business transaction configuration.
- Locate the Purging Policy setting.
- Enter the number of days to retain tracked data.
- Save the transaction configuration.
Limitations
- Purging is irreversible. Deleted transaction instance data cannot be recovered.
- The maximum configurable retention period is 180 days for SaaS and 730 days for private hosting.
- Purging applies to tracked instance data only. Business transaction and business process configurations are retained regardless of the purging policy setting.
- Background job purging of soft-deleted data runs once daily; deletion is not immediate after a business process or transaction is removed.
Troubleshooting
-
Tracked data is still visible after the retention period has passed
Cause: The background purge job has not yet run for the day, or the retention period was recently changed.
Fix: Wait for the daily background job to execute. If data persists beyond the expected window, verify the purging policy value saved on the transaction configuration. -
Purging policy field is not visible in the transaction configuration
Cause: The transaction type may not support purging (for example, Data Queries type transactions do not have a purge policy field).
Fix: Confirm that the transaction is a Custom Logging type. Purging policy configuration is available only for Custom Logging transactions. -
Storage usage is not decreasing after configuring a shorter retention period
Cause: The background job runs once daily and only removes data older than the configured threshold. Existing data within the new threshold is not backfilled for deletion.
Fix: Allow one or more daily cycles for the background job to process the backlog.