How to configure Inventory pruning
This guide shows you how to configure automatic removal of stale devices from a site's Inventory, so your grids reflect what is currently in use rather than accumulating retired hardware.
Prerequisites
- Administrator role on the site.
- You understand the impact: a pruned device disappears from Inventory and from the per-device Change history. Audit Snapshots associated with the device are subject to the same pruning.
Warning: Pruning is destructive — devices removed by pruning are gone from Inventory. Choose a retention period that matches your operational rhythm.
Steps
- Navigate to Admin Center > Site Settings > Settings > Inventory settings.
- In the Pruning section, tick Remove devices that are older than
[N]days. - Set the day count. The default is 365.
- Save the change.
Note: Pruning evaluates devices by audit recency. A device whose latest audit is older than the configured number of days becomes a candidate for removal.
Related lifecycle settings (separate from device pruning)
These two related cleanup mechanisms operate independently of Inventory pruning and are configured on separate pages:
- Audit service inactivity period — Admin Center > Site Settings > Settings > Audit service settings. Schedules an Audit Service for deletion when it has been inactive for more than the configured number of days (default 30).
- Audit agent inactivity period — Admin Center > Site Settings > Settings > Audit agent settings. Same pattern for Audit Agents (default 30).
After being scheduled for deletion, an inactive Service or Agent is deleted after a further inactivity window (the formal lifecycle is ACTIVE → MARKED_FOR_DELETION → DELETED, with SELF_DELETE if the Service or Agent comes online during the window).
Verify
After saving you should see:
- The pruning setting persists on the Inventory settings page.
- Over subsequent audit cycles, devices whose last audit exceeds the threshold are removed from Inventory grids.
Tips
- Use the Stale Devices built-in report and the Dashboard's Devices not audited in the last N days widget to preview which devices would be candidates before tightening the threshold.
- Combine pruning with the Inventory Ignore List on the segment side to prevent unwanted devices from being re-discovered after they are pruned.
- Snapshot offload to S3-compatible storage is independent of pruning. If you are offloading snapshots, pruning the device record does not affect the snapshots stored in the bucket.
Related
- Device Types Reference — what kinds of devices accumulate in Inventory
- About Inventory — how snapshots and Inventory records relate
- Troubleshooting — handling unexpectedly missing devices