Requirements for removing old assets

[GaBo]

My Understanding is that for assets to be removed after lets say 30 days, the following attributes need to meet the 30 days or greater requirement.
LastSeen
LastActiveScan
LastIPScan.

If the field for one of these attributes is blank for an asset, how will that be read when it comes to determining if it meets the greater than 30 days requirement?

also what does the LastSeen attribute actually refer to, is this the last time it was successfully scanned?

I believe the last Active Scan is when it was last detected as part of the Active Directory Scans
and Last IP Scan is when it was last detected when scanning the IP ranges.

[David_Elliott]

GaBo,

I notice the same issue with IPs/DNS. I often flush the DNS cache on the LS server and that seems to correct.

[GaBo]

Thanks for answering so quickly, that info is very helpful but I have a couple of follow up questions.

You mention that " Active Directory Domain scanning only attempts to scan if an asset has logged on to a domain controller". We have the Min and Max settings on the scanning options set to 1 & 7 respectively, I thought that the max setting meant that even if an asset hadn't logged in to the domain controller by this point it would be scanned anyway.
so lets say in our case if we had a desktop that hadnt been logged in to for 7 days that an active scan would run as it had reached the max time between scans.

I am also noticing that we have assets that that are no longer registered in DNS but appear online in Lansweeper.
What appears to be happening is that the DNS record is scavanged as the asset has not been online in sometime, Lansweeper retains the last IP address that asset had. as we use DHCP that address is the assigned to another asset which is online and as the IP address now responds to pings the original asset also appears as online as Lansweeper now has two assets showing the same IP address.

[Bruce_B]

GaBo wrote:
Thanks for answering so quickly, that info is very helpful but I have a couple of follow up questions.

You mention that " Active Directory Domain scanning only attempts to scan if an asset has logged on to a domain controller". We have the Min and Max settings on the scanning options set to 1 & 7 respectively, I thought that the max setting meant that even if an asset hadn't logged in to the domain controller by this point it would be scanned anyway.
so lets say in our case if we had a desktop that hadnt been logged in to for 7 days that an active scan would run as it had reached the max time between scans.

I am also noticing that we have assets that that are no longer registered in DNS but appear online in Lansweeper.
What appears to be happening is that the DNS record is scavanged as the asset has not been online in sometime, Lansweeper retains the last IP address that asset had. as we use DHCP that address is the assigned to another asset which is online and as the IP address now responds to pings the original asset also appears as online as Lansweeper now has two assets showing the same IP address.

Sorry for missing your reply back in February, but I'll add some (late) clarification. Active Directory Domain scanning will only scan computers that have recently logged on to a domain controller, to verify this, the LastLogon attribute of the computer object is checked.

In context of the online status indicator, for non-Windows assets the last scanned IP address is used for this(IP at the top of the asset page), if this IP has been since switched to a different asset this can cause some misreporting of such an asset being online. For more information on the online status indicator you can check out this article.

[Bruce_B]

To be more specific, for the cleanup options "Set assets to non-active if not seen in the last X" and "Permanently delete assets not seen in the last X" to trigger the following needs to be true:

• tblAssets.Lastseen, tblAssets.LastActiveScan and tblAssets.LastIPScan all need to be older than 30 days
  
• The assets need to have an IP address
  
• The assets can't be manually created, this is filtered for based on the assets unique key, for more information on how Lansweeper uniquely identifies assets you can check this article.
  
• tblAssetCustom.PreventCleanup can't be set to 1.

To further clarify upon the Lastseen LastActiveScan and LastIPScan fields in the context of the clean-up option:

• If LastSeen is older than X days, if a successful scan has occurred in the last X days. Last seen is updated whenever an asset was scanned successfully.
  
• If LastActiveScan is older than X days ago. Which means there has been a scanning attempt via Active Directory Domain scanning for the asset, successful or not. Active Directory Domain scanning only attempts to scan if an asset has logged on to a domain controller, this confirms that the asset still exists.
  
• LastIPScan is older than X days ago. Which means there has been a scan attempt via IP scanning, successful or not. When scanning an IP address Lansweeper also checks if a pingable IP matches an asset in Lansweeper, even if the scan is unsuccessful.