"In Service" field for devices

What is the "In Service" field and how does it change?

Whenever Device42 discovers the device for the first time, the "In Service" status will be always True.

This is the case for physical or virtual devices.

This paramter will be changed automatically between True and False for virtual devices only, which means as soon as the discovery job will run, if the VM is not found the flag will be changed to False, for instance it maybe on powered off status and we ignore the powered off VMs, then if the VM is powered on the flag will be changed to True once again. The same applied if there is a discovery failure for the VM for any reason (the flag will be false), then we discovered it once again (the flag will be true).

For physical devices this is always True, even if the device has been decommissioned or we have some discovery failure on it.

If we need to change this flag for False for physical devices automatically, the based possible option is to use the Auto Clean rules for physical devices

in this case, if the physical device is not updated for 30 days the "In Service" status will be changed to "False", which can be used as an indicator that the device is decommissioned already.

Please be noted, the "In Service" status cannot be changed once gain to "True" for the physical devices unless we do that manually from the UI, or the API/Bulk import method.

Finally, there is no option to define or change this values for any type of devices through discovery jobs.