Administration Guide

How to schedule an Audit Service for deletion

This guide shows you how to mark an Audit Service for deletion when you want to retire it on your own timeline rather than wait for the inactivity window to expire.

Use this when you have decommissioned the host that runs the Audit Service, when you have rolled out a replacement and the old one is no longer needed, or when an Audit Service has been in Inactive state for a while and you want to free its slot now.

Prerequisites

  • You are signed in as a Site Administrator.
  • You know which Audit Service you want to retire and have confirmed it is no longer carrying live tasks (check the Tasks tab on its detail modal).

Steps

  1. Navigate to Admin Center > Site Settings > Tasks and services > Audit services.
  2. Click the row of the Audit Service you want to retire. The detail modal opens on the General tab.
  3. Click Schedule for deletion.
  4. Confirm the action.

Verify

The service moves to the ScheduledForDeletion state. The list view reflects the new state on subsequent refresh.

From this point, two outcomes are possible:

  • The service comes back online before the deletion window closes. It self-uninstalls. The host is left without an Audit Service install; no further action on your part is needed.
  • The service stays offline. The background RetiredAgentsAndServices process deletes the registration after the deletion window — roughly the inactivity window again (so about 60 days end-to-end from the original last heartbeat for an inactivity-driven deletion, or sooner for a manually scheduled one).

What happens to credentials and history

Deleting the Audit Service registration removes its credential pool from the Site. Audit history — the device-level snapshots already collected — is unaffected; the Audit log retains its rows.

Important: Once deletion completes, you cannot recover the credential pool. If the credentials are still needed by a replacement service, capture them ahead of time (they cannot be revealed back through the UI; you need the original secrets from your secret store).