Month: February 2022

In my “new” position, the ConfigMgr environment that I administer is a demonstration environment where we show off our product to prospective customers. That means in the environment we have “real” machines that are VM’s and then we have additional devices that have been manually added to ConfigMgr with hardware inventory information, but they never check in with ConfigMgr because they are not physical devices. By default ConfigMgr has been cleaning out these devices every 90 days. Because I try to avoid repetitive work as much as possible, and because I don’t want to have to keep adding devices every 90 days, it’s time to see what I can do to change the length of time that inactive clients are in ConfigMgr before cleanup.

After a couple of quick searches, it looks like there is a setting that determines if inactive clients should be removed from the ConfigMgr database and another that determines how long Hardware Inventory is maintained. Here’s where to get to the settings:

• Step 1: Select Administration on the left hand side of the ConfigMgr console
• Step 2: Select Sites under the Site Configuration folder on the left hand side of the ConfigMgr console.
• Step 3: Select Site Maintenance at the top right of the ConfigMgr console.

The Site Maintenance window will open. Select Delete Aged Discovery Data. This setting determines how long Discovery Data is maintained in the ConfigMgr database. When this data is completely deleted for a device, the device is removed from the ConfigMgr database and console.

Because I also want to make sure that the Hardware Inventory is maintained for our inactive devices, I have also selected Delete Aged Inventory History.

The Delete Aged Inventory History Properties box will open, change the setting Delete data that has been inactive for (days): setting to your preferred setting.

This should keep the inactive devices in our ConfigMgr database, so we can use them for demo purposes, and keep the associated Hardware Inventory connected with them. More information about ConfigMgr maintenance tasks are located here. Microsoft reference for Maintenance Tasks.

There’s a great scene in the second Harry Potter movie after Ron, Fred and George Weasley return to the Burrow after rescuing Harry from Number 4 Privet Drive. In that scene Molly Weasley, their mother, yells at the three Weasley boys “where have you been?” The boys then fumble with all kinds of great excuses for why they left the house with the flying car.

So… that begs the question regarding this blog, where have I been?

It’s not super complicated. I ended up moving on from the company that I was working for in 2019, and got a great gig with a new employer. It is 100% work from home before it was cool!

 The funny thing is that I started writing blogs for them about using their software and I never really found the time to work on my own blogs. Then Covid came. Nothing really changed about my position, except that it got busier, and I had to write even more blogs. That meant that I neglected writing for myself even more.

But it’s time for a change. I’m coming back with some new content about ConfigMgr and life, and I’m even going to be linking to the blogs that I’ve been writing for my “new” employer. Don’t mind that I’ve been there for over two years at this point and can hardly consider them new… but here we are.