Managing and Deleting Axon Facets

Challenge

Axon is designed to keep an audit trail of every change made in the system (if using Change Requests and Workflows on each Facet). If an object is added and then no longer needed, the object would go through the governance program for approval and at some point would be given an Axon status of deleted (i.e., “soft” delete). All history would be available for review, including the status change to deleted.

Based on data retention policies, the deleted objects may eventually need to be purged (i.e., “hard” delete) from the system. Often organizations are not sure of the best way to track what has been deleted and how to restore this information if necessary. Below are some examples of potential needs to delete facets:

• Imported datasets and glossary facets from other systems that will not be governed.
• A sync with LDAP with incorrect filters caused a larger number of people to be added than what was needed.
• Duplicate Glossary terms by different business areas.

Eventually these items can be marked for deletion, and based on retention policy will be ready to be removed from the Axon repository.

Description

The best management for deleted objects is to prevent loading unwanted data into Axon in the first place and thus avoid having to delete the information later. Some thought should be given into what should be imported into Axon. To help with this, Populating Axon with Data from other Systems provides an overview with considerations of when to load data into Axon.

Axon provides multiple ways to manage the life of the objects within a facet through lifecycle and status indicators. The lifecycle and status indicators have different settings based on the type of facet. A good place to review available values can be found in Bulk Upload Templates in docs.informatica.com.

For example, the Glossary lifecycles are Draft, Being validated, Approved, and Obsolete. The Axon Status values are Active, Inactive, Pending Review, Obsolete, Deleted.

These facets can be filtered in the unison search on lifecycle and/or status to help remove unwanted objects from the results. Based on governance rules an obsolete object may be marked for delete.

An Axon status of ‘Deleted’ is a soft delete. The data is retained in the Axon repository and is available for review by anyone with a profile of Admin or Superadmin. Webusers will not see any object with a status of Deleted.

At some point based on company or legal policies associated to the facet, the object can be “hard” deleted and completely removed from the Axon repository.

For a Superadmin to delete an object it needs to satisfy a set of required conditions. These delete object conditions vary based on the facet type. An object must satisfy the following conditions that are common to all the facets:

• The Axon Status of the object is Deleted.
• The object does not have related objects in the Impact tab or Relationship tab.
• The object does not have any child object
• The object cannot be involved in an open Change Request/Workflow process

The condition to change the status of an object to Deleted does not apply to the following facets because they don’t contain Axon status:

• Geography
• Regulator

In a Unison search, the Bulk Delete feature can be used to delete multiple objects of a facet at a time. The Bulk Delete option does not appear for the following facets:

• Active Tasks
• Change Requests
• Physical Fields
• Role

Considerations for Managing “Hard“ Deleted Objects

• Schedule daily production backups of the Axon repository database. The database can be restored back into production or restored to a secondary non-prod environment to allow access to the deleted objects.
  • The objects can be exported from the secondary non-prod environment and bulk loaded back into production. Before exporting, turn on all the columns to be exported.
  • Caution -- export does not export everything. For the Glossary facet, the Axon Viewing and Parent Ref-ID are not exported. The CIA field is exported as one field which needs to be split into three fields for the import.
• Use the Unison Search to filter for a given set of objects that need to be deleted within a facet. Export a report to Excel to record what was deleted that day. Perform a bulk delete operation. Keep the report to know what was deleted on a given day and which backup contains the data.