Abstract
Imagine an organization with applications on Pega Cloud where cases are stored in large database tables that impacts both user experience and system performance.
This article outlines how the Case Archival solution was designed using the Pega Case Archival Discovery Journey—a step-by-step guide that helped gather user needs and infrastructure requirements, correctly set up and tune the case archival and address custom archival requirements.
The Context
The Pega Case Archival Discovery process was derived from consultative archival advisory services delivered to multiple customers. By collecting this information, a clear process was defined to design and tune case archival solutions effectively.
The discovery phase started when Pega Consulting engaged with stakeholders across business, IT operations, and development teams—including customer Technical Leads—to gather requirements essential for defining the final case archival solution. The process comprised by the following steps:
- Archival user needs: Collected archival user requirements including archival and retention policies, legal hold requirements, and who accessed archived cases.
- Infrastructure user needs and non-functional requirements: Analyzed the customer architecture and identified which systems the Pega application communicated with. This phase was important to understand database storage volumes and identify performance issues.
- Case Archival Design Options: Evaluated the application design to determine reporting and security requirements, identified operator access rights for archived cases. The information collected were finalized in multiple case archival design proposals.
Why Case Archival Matters
When customers encountered delays in accessing or using Pega Applications, the database footprint could be a contributing factor. Through numerous case archival consultations with many clients, Pega case archival has proven to be an effective solution for resolving most of the performance challenges. This approach preserved historical case data and ensured compliance with both regulatory and business requirements.
Prerequisites
Readers should be familiar with the Pega Case Archival feature, as this article builds directly on its core configuration capabilities.
Pega Case Archival strategy discovery process
Collecting archival user needs
In this phase, Pega Consulting met business stakeholders and the customer’s Lead System Architects to gather user needs and address challenges such as improving user experience, enhancing archived data search, and securing access to archived data. These objectives kept the audience focused on providing Pega Consulting the baseline information to design the case archival solution.
Pega Case Archival has demonstrated its effectiveness across several use cases by relocating redundant data to secondary storage. Example of issues that Pega Case Archival could resolve:
- Users experienced extended case loading and search times due to millions of case instances in the database case table.
- There were frequent errors when loading cases with large amounts of data, and Pega required additional time to save these cases.
- The database case tables had limited available free storage space because of a high number of unresolved (inflight) cases.
Defining the case archival policy — to know how many cases in the past to archive — and the retention policy for deleting archived data from secondary storage was paramount to setup archival. These parameters were set according to customer requirements.
Searching for archived cases was available out‑of‑the‑box in the Pega Infinity platform; however, customer requirements sometimes needed search customizations. For instance, when setting up Pega Customer Service case archival search. See Search for archived cases in the Pega CS Interaction portal for more details.
Securing access to archived cases inside the application (i.e. enabling the search on archived cases), was set up through access groups associated with back-office administrators.
Custom archival requirements required the use of dynamic archival policies for each case type. This was a new feature since Pega Infinity 24.2 that allowed the configuration of archival or retention policies depending on case properties specified on business conditions. See Configure the case archival process for more information.
There were also customer requirements so that the cases archived could not contain sensitive data. This requirement could not be satisfied by the out‑of‑the‑box Pega Case Archival. It supported the Right to Be Forgotten privacy policy, which was part of privacy regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). This allowed users to delete individual archived case hierarchies, including all cases in the hierarchy and all associated data— but not specific sensitive data inside the archived cases.
Analyzing the application design
Understanding the application design was essential for configuring the Pega Case Archival on the application. Impact examples:
- Custom archival requirements were impacted by how the cases were created. For each case type, a distinct archival policy was necessary based on properties used to create the case.
- The case design can impact the configuration of case archiving, particularly when cases are instantiated dynamically through specialized classes. Without case type definitions in subclasses, it is not possible to implement archival.
- A customer requirement maintained an online data table that audits request and response payloads during connector invocations. The standard Pega Case Archival functionality could not be utilized to archive these records, as all records needed to remain accessible. The online data table (class Data-Tracking) and archived records stored in a separate table (class Data-Arch-Tracking) were accessed as needed through a Dashboard.
Collecting infrastructure needs and non-functional requirements
Analysis of the volumes of tables was the most important aspect to consider. Huge database case tables that were never archived, attachments stored in the database (could be configured in Pega Cloud also if this is not the default option), and history tables never archived highlighted the urgent need for data optimization. Correctly setting up the Pega Case Archival helped customers to improve the performances, by maintaining database storage under acceptable limits.
Monitoring and planning of case archival
One of the best practices was monitor Pega Case Archival performance. The customer tested archival job settings—maxCrawlerRequestors, maxCopierRequestors—and job frequency—in production or similarly scaled environments.
Log-CaseArchivalSummary reports provided insights into job execution and ensured performance did not exceed the database’s Max IOPS (input/output operations per seconds).
Archival planning began within the first go-live, addressing a significant archival backlog. Running the archival job multiple times daily reduced this backlog, allowing for lower frequency daily rates in the following weeks.
Recommended archival solution
The Case Archival strategy evaluated multiple archival approaches, including both Pega out‑of‑the‑box capabilities and custom‑built solutions, through a structured side‑by‑side comparisons based on operational complexity, performance impact and long‑term maintainability.
Based on many consultative archival advisory missions, the recommended solution was the out-of-the-box Pega Case Archival, primarily due to its native integration with Pega platform, simplicity of configuration and monitoring and low operational overhead.
The out-of-the-box Pega Case Archival solution leveraged Pega‑provided mechanisms preserving referential integrity, auditability and search of archived cases with controlled access for compliance and security. This approach minimized custom development, reduced platform risk, and aligned with Pega best practices for performance optimization and lifecycle data management.
A custom archival solution should only be considered when:
- There are explicit regulatory or legal constraints not supported by out-of-the-box Pega Case Archival, or
- There is a mandatory requirement to integrate with a non‑Pega enterprise archival platform that cannot be met through standard Pega extensions.
Conclusion
By following the Pega Case Archival strategy journey, organizations achieved:
- Improved Performance: Minimized database footprint and increased application performance
- Enhanced User Experience: Reduced case loading and search times by relocating redundant data to secondary storage
- Regulatory Compliance: Retained historical case data and met compliance requirements
- Optimized Infrastructure: Recovered database free space and improved overall system performance
The Pega Case Archival Discovery Journey provided a systematic approach that ensures successful case archival implementation aligned with both technical requirements and business objectives.
References
Pega case archival and expunge overview
Configure the case archival process
Pega case archival and expunge process details
Search for archived cases in the Pega Customer Service Interaction portal