I am looking for the best way to unmonitor a device without deleting it.

You can automate this. It would just be through the API, which is where 99% of the automation capabilities exist in LM as in most products.

However, the automation will not free up the license cost. License cost is tied up in there being historical data. But the ability to completely disable a device without deleting it totally exists. You just have to do it through the API.. you just have to do it through the API.

Why not add IP exclusions to your netscans and delete the device? It’d stay gone forever.

@Stuart Weenig , this workaround no longer works :(  and it was such a great workaround!

The fake collector will add but prompted with “Preferred Agent is unregister” when attempting to add devices to it. 

Not a real easy way to do this. The prescribed way is to disable each instance under the device using the toggle on the right hand side. Tedious, but would work.

Another possibility would be to create a fake collector (go through the process of adding one, but don’t install it anywhere) and assign the devices to that collector.

As well, the goal of avoiding charges is impossible -- any device in the system is charged (unlike some other products that exclude down devices from billing, like Auvik). I can appreciate why this is true in LM since the concept of down can be a bit fuzzy.  I personally have never used auto-add for netscans since I am not a fan of unmanaged charge increases :).  I did write an API script to report on netscan finding details regularly (at the time that was not possible in LM, perhaps it is now).

That’s true. You’re charged because the service provided by LM isn’t just data collection, but also monitored data storage. 

Thanks for this info.  This is unfortunate.  I assumed with LMs talk of automation and easy of management this would be a simple task and something I just failed to find.

I noticed when I had netscans setup to send devices into “Unmonitored” it did not count those devices in the license count which is why I wanted to move them there.  I will just have to change my scans back and go back to manually run them and just manually add the devices I need monitored.

This was going to be my suggestion. IP Exclusions will be the only way to avoid charges if continued this way. The only other way I can think of is to automatically put the devices into unmonitored and have someone check that list every morning.

You could script this. The SDK won’t help you though because they didn’t build in the PATCH/PUT operations for netscans. However, they exist in the API (even though they are undocumented). 

Your script would prompt you for the device you want to delete.

Then it would use your input to delete the specified device by IP address.

Then it would do a GET on /setting/netscans/{netscanId} (do a GET on /setting/netscans to find the ID, which won’t be changing).

Then it would modify the “exclude” property of the response payload body, adding “,{deleted_device’s_ip_address}” to the end.

Then it would PUT that payload onto /setting/netscans/{netscanId}.

If none of that makes sense, that’s ok, working with the API isn’t beginner level stuff. You could contract someone to do it or engage LM pro services.

Just as well. The Netscan exclusion is the better way anyway.