Deleting Audit Data

With the Delete Audit Data wizard you can either delete audit records immediately, or schedule a task for the deletion. You can also configure this to be a recurring task and delete audit records at regular intervals.

Before you begin

• Ensure that you have administrative access to the OneSpan Authentication Server Administration Web Interface.
• Ensure that you have the Delete Audit Information administrative privilege assigned.

Deleting audit data via the Delete Audit Data wizard

To delete audit records via the Delete Audit Data wizard

1. In Administration Web Interface, select SERVERS > Delete Audit Data.
2. In the Audit data tab, enter the age of the audit data that you want to delete in days and click NEXT. This field must not be blank.

3. In the Schedule task tab, specify the following:

   1. Task mode. Select the server you want to run the task.

      • Any server. The first server that claims the delete audit data task will also execute it.
      • This server. Only this server will delete the audit data.
      • All servers. All running servers will execute the delete audit data task.
   2. Run immediately. If you select this option, the task will be run immediately in the background.
   3. Schedule. Select this option, if you would like to schedule the task to be run at a certain time. Choose if you wish to be notified, when the task is completed, and the notification method, i.e. via e-mail or via SMS. Here you can also select, if you would like this to be scheduled as a recurring task and the recurrence type, i.e. daily, or monthly.

4. Click NEXT.

   Administration Web Interface will display a summary of the delete audit task.

5. Click FINISH. This will take you to the Task Management page, where you can verify and manage the delete audit data tasks you have created.

Additional considerations

• You can retrieve the information about the audit records that were deleted from the corresponding task status message and the audit logs.

• You can configure the database chunk size for the delete operation by setting the value of Task-Manager_TaskProcessing_BatchRecordCount in the vdsConfiguration table. The default value is 10000, which means that at most 10000 records are deleted in one go (repeatedly if there are more records to delete).

  If you set the value to 0, all affected records are deleted at once. Note that this can lead to database lock timeouts and service interruption, especially in environments with limited disk space.

Next steps

Depending on the used DBMS, deleting audit data does not automatically or immediately release the consumed disk space. For instance, in case of MariaDB the database engine marks the space as available for reuse, but does not effectively reduce the disk space used by the database files (unless you are using database partitioning). This space is reclaimed by the database over time when new data is written.

For MariaDB, you can attempt to release the space marked as deleted by optimizing the audit tables with the mysql command:

mysql -u db_username -p db_password --ssl=TRUE

Run the following script:

OPTIMIZE TABLE vdsauditmsg;
OPTIMIZE TABLE vdsauditmsgfield;
QUIT;

The possibilities and methods to reclaim unused disk space differ depending on the DBMS used. It is beyond the scope of this guide to provide detailed procedures for each supported DBMS. For more information and detailed instructions, refer to the product documentation of the respective DBMS and additional resources on the internet.