Delete vs Ignored - Best Practice?

[king_nolan]

What is the best practice for the STATUS field of devices that are no longer in our environment or have been upgraded and have new entries in ITAM (from a new Serial No. for example)?  Is it best to DELETE the old device records or mark the status= IGNORED?  What is the proper usage of the IGNORED status?  Why would we want to mark IGNORED vs delete and vice versa?

[atique]

If you have single inventory for device which is no longer in your organization(decommissioned) then mark it as ignored.(Ignored device can be handy for organization in future).

If you have duplicate inventory for single device one new and other old then delete the old one.

Ignored device do not consume IT asset license.

[RWG2022]

Personally I delete the inventory device from Flexera if it is no longer in our environment, for example disposed, deleted VM etc. I do this for the following reasons.

1) If it's gone, it's gone. Why keep it.

2) Whilst changing the status to ignored will exclude any applications from consuming licenses etc, I still find running other reports will include ignored machines, and relies on you manually filtering them out. I like my inventory to be as clean as possible.

3) If you are audited and the auditor wants to use data from Flexera to help produce an ELP, you don't want them to potentially see what you may have had deployed in the past.

For duplicate machines, for example a machine has been rebuilt and has a new name, I delete the old one.

Whenever I delete machines from All Inventory, I also delete the same record from All Discovered Devices.

[GrigoriiG]

I prefer to Ignore the irrelevant inventory first, as it has an immediate and persistent effect, secures from the occasional re-creation of the deleted inventory (e.g., via VMware connector or SCCM), and gives the option to rollback.

In 1-2 weeks I may Delete the Ignored inventories if they are not being updated anymore. 

[ChrisG]

It is ideal for raw inventory records in your inventory source database that are associated with decommissioned computers to be deleted. How this occurs will depend on the particular inventory source that you use. Any associated inventory device record in Flexera One ITAM will normally be removed by the next import once raw inventory is deleted from the inventory source for the associated computer, .

If for some reason you are unable to arrange for raw inventory to be deleted from your inventory source when a computer is decommissioned, a fallback option is to give the associated inventory device a status of "Ignored".

Deleting an inventory device record without arranging for the underlying raw inventory in the inventory source to be deleted won't help. The inventory device will simply be re-created the next time inventory is import.

[RWG2022]

Hi Chris, how does this work when using the Flexera inventory agent please, because we don't see what you are describing in our environment. For example if we decom a VM, and that is deleted from our VMware environment, the record remains in FlexeraOne until it is manually deleted. Are there some settings on the Beacon that perhaps we haven't configured? Thanks

[ChrisG]

Automated deletion of raw inventory gathered by the FlexNet inventory agent will occur in the following situations:

• When the Active Directory computer object associated with the inventory (if any) is deleted or disabled.
• When the inventory data associated with the computer has not been updated for the period of time identified by the "Obsolete inventory" configuration setting (if that setting is configured).

If you have a source of data that will identify VMs that have been decommissioned in your environment then you might consider using a business adapter to set the status of associated inventory device records to "Ignored" prior to any automatic deletion that might occur due to the above conditions.