FAQ about the Activity Log

FAQ about Activity Log

• When an activity occurs, it is simultaneously written into two storage areas, “activity log hot storage” and “activity log cold storage.” 

• The purpose of hot storage is to provide fast retrieval for recent activity. The retention period for hot storage is configurable but is set by default to 4 months. A daily process purges data from hot storage if the activity date is older than the hot storage retention period.

• The purpose of cold storage is to hold the Activity data for the whole duration of the tenant’s cold storage retention period, which could be 1 to 7 years. This is configurable, but during provisioning, the team sets the cold storage retention period to a value dictated by the industry to which the customer is categorized in Salesforce.

• When a client puts forth a query against the Activity Log, the API considers the date range included in the query and determines which storage to use. If the date range falls within the last 3 months, the API will leverage the hot storage, and results will be returned rapidly. If the date range includes a time older than 3 months, the API recognizes that hot storage does not contain all the data required for the query so it will instead direct the query against the cold storage, with results being returned much slower. 

• When a user performs a “hard delete” on an entity, the effect on the Activity Log is that entity activity records are removed from the hot storage only. The long-term Activity records that reside in cold storage are left intact. (This is important as regards the effect on RSU consumption) 

• A user can obtain an export of the Activity Log by leveraging the Activity Log Export API, and can even specify a date range. The user does not need to think about the two forms of storage behind the scenes; the export API operates the same as the logic used for the Activity Log facet. It uses the date range in the query to determine whether to query the hot or cold storage.

Open image-20250127-223732.png