Scorecard History Tracking Using TONS of SFDC Storage

Related products: None

We are currently tracking the history of changes to our Scorecards. This is very important to us since we have a couple Scorecards that are updated manually and we want to know who the last person was to make the update and when. However, enabling scorecard history uses a MASSIVE amount of SFDC storage. Over 6 months with 7 Scorecards and 2,500 customers, the Scorecard history used 4GB of SFDC data. Salesforce charges a ridiculous $3,000/GB/year for storage! So in 6 months we racked up an additional $12,000 in recurring annual fees with Salesforce.





We changed the history tracking down to 48 hours instead of 12 hours, but that still puts us at 2GB/year -- $6,000/year in additional SFDC storage costs. We are also rapidly expanding our customer base, which going to make this number grow even more.





The feature request here is to allow history tracking with time periods greater than 48 hours. This could substantially cut down on data usage. We would be fine with tracking the person who last updated a scorecard and a timestamp on a weekly or even biweekly basis. That would bring SFDC storage costs down to a more reasonable level and give us the visibility we need. Thanks in advance for your consideration!





Great suggestion, Joshua.  I have heard this from a few customers before as well.
Another thing to consider is vendors who specialize in archiving from SFDC. Search 'backup' on the appexchange to see what is available.  If you want to collect as much data as possible you'll have to setup an integration that periodically (daily?) stores history into another database that's less expensive than SFDC. Traditional ones like SQL give pretty reliable access to that - but there are new cloud based data stores that might also work.





For the cheapest option available, you could use a data client like DemandTools or dataloader.io (there's a limited free version of this)  to setup 2 separate routines: 1) an Export of the field history for that particular day/week  2) a routine that takes those ID's and then deletes them from your SFDC history table. That way you're essentially offloading the data storage to another place.  However, although this is a great cheap method - this approach stores the data in csv files typically - so it makes it harder to trudge through the data if you want to know which Scorecard got changed, by who, and when. 
Great suggestion Luis! We will test that out as well. However, for Gainsight I think there would still be a lot of value in having out-of-the box settings beyond 48 hours and even having the project managers set one-week as the default during customer onboarding. This way SFDC admins don't have a heart attack when they find out how much data this feature is using 🙂
Yes, and maybe built in ability to do archival of field history! 
Joshua,





Could you please help me with answers for the following questions so that we have a through understanding of the situation at hand?







  • What is the frequency of updates to the 2 manual scores you're referring to?



  • How do you currently use Scorecard History data? Do you build reports in reports 2.0 and use it in 360? 
Thanks,


Sumesh
Hi Sumesh,





The manual scores are only updated once every 2-4 weeks and only for about half of our accounts. The scorecard history is in our 360 views and account widget. We have a ton of reports with Scorecard data as well.





Josh
Thanks, Josh!





I've sent you an email in regards to this post. Kindly respond.





Thanks,


Sumesh
This is an issue we are currently running in to.  Is there an update as to if/when settings will be updated to include time frames greater than 48 hours?





Thanks,





Scott
Would like an update on this as well.  We're just rolling out our scorecard and we were stunned to see how much data was used.  We have five score components and about 3500 customers getting scores; we set history tracking to 12 hours and we're at 244 MB already, after generating scores for the first time on Monday.  I've set it to 48 hours but this is going to fill up our storage pretty quick, and we might have to ditch tracking scorecard history for this reason.
Hi Sean!





Just to confirm, you're utilizing the scorecard history on the Customer 360 page, right?  If so, then the box you need to check is the "Load Snapshot to Engagement Every Week" box (this writes records to the Usage Data object in Gainsight).





The Enable History Tracking box can be unchecked.  It does not write historical values, but rather writes records to the Scorecard History object (this data is not used for trending historical data that you see on the Customer 360 graph).





Let me know if you have any questions.





Scott