If you ever run into a situation where you’ve reached your storage capacity with Dynamics CRM Online and you’re not too sure how to reclaim that space, here are a few tips.

System Jobs

System Jobs are background processes that create a number of log records. System Log records indicate whether a workflow process has succeeded or failed. As you can imagine, complete logging (that is all jobs that have completed successfully and with exceptions) can quickly eat into your precious storage.

One strategy for saving space is to create a Bulk Deletion job to discard any Succeeded records that are older than a predefined time period (e.g. all Succeeded Records older than one month).

Plugin Trace Log

If you’re operating in an Development environment or debugging an issue within Production, it may be useful to enable Plug-in and Custom Workflow Activity Tracing. However, you may not necessarily want to enable logging for all messages generated from Plug-ins and Custom Workflows as more often you will be primarily interested in only the Exceptions. You can set Plug-in Tracing from the Systems Settings menu and clicking on the Customization tab.

Also you can also use this opportunity to clear out the Plugin Trace Log, which can access from Settings -> Customization -> Plug-in Trace Log.

Data Import and Data Migration

Data Migration of records may result in a large number of log records also. During data migration, it may be useful to disable auditing and superfluous workflow processes. This will limit the amount of storage required for data migration activities.

You may disable Auditing from the Systems Settings menu.

Entity Sizes

Records within Entities obviously consume storage, and the easiest method of checking space consumption is through the Settings -> Administration -> Resources in Use menu item.

Some considerations should be made on the amount of records that are being stored at the Entity level. For instance, can we discard records of a particular age, can we reduce the character length of an ID field from 255 to 20 if we know ID’s will only be 20 characters in length.

Summary

Hopefully some of these tips will be useful to you, there are plenty of other strategies for reducing data including moving storage to a SharePoint Site or other Document Management System, as well as real-time data integration whereby data is only displayed on-demand rather than being cached within CRM. I hope to explore these topics in depth in another blog, but for now if you have any comments please feel free to leave a message below. Until next time…