Archiver
Clean up your stale and forgotten Answers and Liveboards to improve the health of your ThoughtSpot platform.
Part of running an efficient ThoughtSpot cluster is ensuring you maintain a healthy balance of new and existing content. As Administrators and Data Managers, we want to encourage users to find and interact with Answer and Liveboards which meaningfully drive the business forward.
Once your ThoughtSpot adoption grows, it is a good practice to regularly identify stale user content and remove it
from the system. This helps your users continue to find relevant, timely, and useful content to interact with.
There is No Magic!
Remember, CS Tools wraps the ThoughtSpot REST APIs. This tool uses the following endpoints.
/searchdatafor fetching Object interaction activity/metadata/searchfor fetching Object modification activity/tags/assignfor tagging content/metadata/tml/exportfor exporting tagged content/metadata/deletefor removing tags and deleting tagged content
Define a Process
Critical
This step is important!! The Archiver is a bulk operation tool which can delete many objects at once. It's important to be careful!
Run the identify command to identify stale content using the same value for both --recent-activity and
--recent-modified to define an "inactivity" threshold. Any visualization object which has not been opened, edited, or
saved during this time will be identified in your ThoughtSpot cluster with the tag name you specify with --tag.
Use the --syncer parameter to export a CSV of the tagged objects and their respective owners.
Communicate with Users
Let your Users know that their visualizations may be removed from the ThoughtSpot platform.
This is a good opportunity to leverage your internal Slack or Microsoft Teams channels.
SAMPLE COMMUNICATION
*For the health and stability of the ThoughtSpot cluster, your Administration team is planning a reduction of unutilized visualizations. As of
YYYY/MM/DD, we will be removing all Answers and Liveboards tagged with theINACTIVEtag.If you wish to keep your visualization or opt-out of the cleaning process, please remove the tag prior to
YYYY/MM/DD.*
You should provide clear timelines to Users and aim for a 2 weeks notice before removing their visualizations.
Clean Up the Cluster
Run the remove command to delete any content which still has the INACTIVE tag.
Critical
Remember this is a 
DESTRUCTIVE activity!
CS Tools provides you the ability to export all tagged objects prior to removal from ThoughtSpot using the
--directory PATH and --export-only parameters. Using this alongside the --syncer csv://directory=PATH will provide
you a total guarantee that you can restore the deleted object if a user comes back and requests it.