If your organization is heavily using Flow Designer or you are just starting to fully maximize it on important workflows then you should know that:

Now, let's be more specific because for step reports, ServiceNow deletes them permanently just after 1 week!

Flow reporting data tables
| Table | Description | Default retention period |
| ------------------------- | ---------------------------------- | ------------------------ |
| sys_flow_action_report | Flow engine context action reports | 6 Months |
| sys_flow_context | Flow context | 6 Months |
| sys_flow_flow_report | Flow designer executions | 6 Months |
| sys_flow_step_report | Flow engine context step reports | 1 Week |

SOURCE: Flow execution details retention | ServiceNow Docs - Quebec

How did we know?

Well, we learned it the hard way when we needed to troubleshoot a recently closed requested item and was surprised to find out that the Flow Execution details for that RITM was already permanently deleted by ServiceNow. It was very hard and nearly impossible to troubleshoot especially if the issue is related on the timing of how a specific action took place or if you have a frequently changed Flows/Subflows and since ServiceNow does not keep Flow versions as well (unless you manually copy it for every updated version you do) then you're screwed.

The worst part here is that ServiceNow did not document this behavior until New York! So for 3 releases (Kingston, London and Madrid) ServiceNow did not bother to inform their customers about this retention policy. It is not mentioned even once on any Now Learning courses related to Flow Designer and is not part of any administration training available as of February 2021.

What should you do?

If you already know about this retention policy and adjusted them prior - congratulations! You've saved yourself from a lot of audit headaches (How did you know about it? Let us know in the comments below). If this is the first time, you're hearing about this then stop whatever you're doing and do the following right away (or talk to your instance administrator to review).

It's quite simple, you just need to open the sys_auto_flush table, filter with Tablename starts with sys_flow_ then decide any of the actions below on resulting records:

1. Set the "Active" flag to false
2. or Set the "Age in seconds" value to maybe 10 or 15 years (depending on your organization's retention policies)

As ServiceNow warns on the documentation page, flow designer reporting takes a large amount of data for storage, so do this at your own risk. But let me ask you, if it's a question of whether you get screwed during your audits versus having system logs consuming storage space on your ServiceNow instance, what would you choose?

Closing thoughts...

6 months retention policy for such an important piece of system log is such an ill-thought design for Flow Designer. How an important piece of information like retention policy for Flow Designer was only documented after 3 major family releases is such a big oversight that hopefully ServiceNow will improve upon moving forward in terms of communicating important things like this (right now, this information is deeply buried in ServiceNow Docs portal.)

ServiceNow should really take a hard look at how these logs are stored in the system because there are numerous approaches that they can implement to tackle the large consumption of storage issue where this is all rooted. We can convert the execution details to a static snapshot for example or do a heavily compressed archiving system where the logs are moved off after set period but can be requested to be checked out ad-hoc for audit purposes.

Until ServiceNow comes-up with a better way on handling this mess back-end, learn from our experience now and save yourself from an audit nightmare.

PS. Please do vote this submitted idea on the Idea Portal so we can nudge ServiceNow to take action and address this issue.