Disabling auditing for Journal fields will break the Activity Formatter - Support and Troubleshooting

Disabling auditing for Journal fields will break the Activity Formatter Issue  By default, in an out-of-box ServiceNow instance, the system is configured to audit most fields on a table. Auditing unnecessary fields can cause excessive growth on the size of the sys_audit table and shards. We often turn off auditing for extraneous fields that are deemed by the customer to not add any business value and this, in turn, reduces the storage overhead. Fields that include transient data, or where the history is not needed often fit this description. Refer to the documentation for details on enabling auditing to Inclusion list a table or backlist fields for auditing .

That said, we have to be careful about disabling auditing for any Journal type of field which includes Journal_input as these can cause issues with the display of the Activity Formatter.

This occurs because Activity Formatter relies on sys_audit, sys_history_line000x, and sys_journal_field to show the data stream of Work Notes, Comments, etc. When a new Comment, Work Note, or system-generated events are saved, an entry is created in the sys_journal_field table. When auditing is enabled for this field (default behavior), entries are also generated in sys_audit and sys_history_line000x tables.

Consequently, with auditing turned off, there will be no audit records created in the sys_audit and in turn no sys_history_line entries either. This will cause the Activity stream to not show any new data created after auditing was turned off similar to how other fields will not show data if they are not audited.

This applies to any Journal fields linked to the activity feed.

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Example On an incident record, enter a work note and save the record. If auditing for Work Notes on task is turned off, the new Work Note will not show on the activity feed.

Activity feed will show any entries created prior to turning off the audit if present.

Resolution Open the sys_dictionary record for the field.

Review the Attributes field information. If the field is set with no_audit. Remove the no_audit from the attributes field or remove the no_audit record on the attributes tab. Thereafter, any new Work Notes created will be seen.

In cases where a large number of entries to Journal fields such as “Work Notes” are adding a huge Auditing overhead, we strongly recommend examining and resolving the issue at the source i.e. some investigation should be done to check for any errant processes which may be making more updates to the field than we would otherwise expect. Addressing this aspect will in turn also address the issue with auditing overhead.

Related Links Enable auditing for a table