Archiving and deleting devices

Networks collect devices that are gone or no longer matter: laptops and phones that left, a switch that was replaced. They clutter every list and count. Archiving a device hides it everywhere and stops checking it, but keeps its history and device details, so you can restore it later with all its sensors. Discovery never adds an archived device back.

Archive a device

1. Open the device: select its name on the Devices tab, or wherever it appears.
2. Choose Archive device, add a Note (optional) such as Replaced by RB-CORE-SW02, and choose Archive. A message offers Undo in case you picked the wrong one.
3. To archive several devices at once, tick their sensors in Devices › Sensors and choose Archive devices. Every device those sensors belong to is archived, after the same confirmation.

Clean up devices nobody has seen

1. Open Settings › Archived devices and choose Clean up. It lists devices that have been Down, and endpoints (laptops, phones and others watched for presence) that have been Offline, for more than 30 days.
2. For another period, enter it under Not seen for more than … days and choose Show. Filter with All, Endpoints or Other devices, and select a device name to look at it first.
3. Tick the devices that are gone, or tick the box in the header to select all shown, and choose Archive selected. They're archived in one go with the note Not seen for more than 30 days, and a message offers Undo.

Restore or delete

• Settings › Archived devices › Archived lists every archived device with when, by whom and the note. Choose Restore, or tick several and choose Restore selected. Their sensors are checked again at once, and any that were Paused before stay Paused.
• In Devices › Sensors, tick Show archived (N) to see archived sensors, marked archived, with a Restore device button for each device.
• Delete… on the Archived list, or Delete device… in the device dialog, removes the device's sensors from the configuration for good. Type the device name to confirm (or the number of devices when you delete several), then choose Delete permanently.
• Tick Also delete its history and device details now to remove those too. Otherwise the history stays until it ages out.

Automatic clean-up of endpoints

Under Clean-up settings, tick Archive endpoints automatically when they haven't been seen for that long, set Archive endpoints automatically after (days), 90 by default, and choose Save settings. Once an hour, endpoints watched only for presence that haven't been seen for that long are archived, each with a line in the audit log under automatic clean-up. Network gear, servers and printers are never archived automatically: a long outage there is a problem to fix. The same panel sets how far back Clean up looks, 30 days by default.

Tip: Only time the collector was running counts. A collector that was switched off for months, or restored from an old backup, doesn't archive every endpoint that happens to be Offline when it starts again. Nothing is archived automatically while no sensor at all is Up, because then the collector itself may be cut off.

Good to know

• Delete can't be undone. Archive when in doubt: an archived device costs nothing but a few lines of configuration.
• Archived devices are left out of reports, email reports and the hub, and don't count toward your license. A restore counts the device again, so it's refused with the reason after the evaluation, after the license expires or when you're over the device limit. Archiving and deleting always work.
• Discovery recognizes an archived device by the addresses its sensors check, marks it archived in the results and won't add it from there. A replacement at the same address counts as the archived device: restore it, or delete it so discovery can add the new one.
• A laptop that comes back with a different DHCP address is a new device to discovery. A deleted device can come back too, if discovery finds it again; archive it instead to keep it out.
• History follows the normal retention (30 days by default), archived or not. An archived device's details are kept until you restore or delete it.
• If a credential an archived device used has been deleted, the restore is refused and names it. Add it again in Settings › Credentials, then restore.
• Only admins can archive, restore and delete. Every change is in the audit log, and Settings › Webhooks can send device archived, restored and deleted events to another system.