Automatically delete Objects that have the Status “Pending Delete”

When Configuration Items are deleted from the CMDB, these objects are not deleted instantly. Instead they are marked as deleted and are removed from the CI views. These CIs are now in the status “Pending Delete” and will remain in this state. Such Objects are visible in the folder “Deleted Items” under the Administration wunderbar. When objects are marked in this folder, you have the possibility to restore them back to a regular state or delete them permanently. Permanently means, that the status again changes, this time to “Deleted”. And those (and only those) objects are removed by the purging workflow from the CMDB (Important: They will not be deleted from the Data Warehouse!). This blog post shows how you can bulk delete objects that are in the “Pending Delete” state by using a simple Powershell script.

This Script can be used to automate the permanently deletion of objects. Otherwise objects stay in the state “Pending Delete” until you remove them manually. You can run the script by using a Service Manager workflow, Opalis or a simple scheduled task. Here we go with the script.

import-smlets
$class = Get-SCSMClass | where{$_.name -match “system.configitem”}
$deletedobjects = Get-SCSMObject -class $class | where{$_.objectstatus -match “Pending”}
$deletedobjects | set-scsmobject -property objectstatus -value deleted

The first line is used to import the smlets, they are needed and you can get them here. The second line is used to get objects from the Configuration Item class later. The third line gets objects from the Configuration Item class that have the status “Pending Delete”. And the last line updates the status of all those objects to “Deleted”.

For detailled information about the grooming process in the Service Manager database, see this article.

regards
Marcel

6 Responses to Automatically delete Objects that have the Status “Pending Delete”

Guido says:

05/03/2012 at 18:00

Hi Marcel, Can i keep on the CMDB all CIs that were deleted from AD or SCCM?? Regards.

Jim says:

19/04/2013 at 02:36

Is there any way the script can be tweaked to just remove deleted users only, not CI’s?

- Marcel Zehner says:
  
  22/04/2013 at 21:48
  
  Hey
  
  Sure, just change the class. Here’s an example with a slightly different code than in the post:
  
  import-module smlets
  $class = get-scsmclass microsoft.windows.computer$ #### Change to the class id you need
  $enum = (Get-SCSMEnumeration System.ConfigItem.ObjectStatusEnum.PendingDelete$).id
  $deletedobjects = Get-SCSMObject -class $class -filter “ObjectStatus -eq ‘$enum'”
  $deletedobjects | set-scsmobject -property objectstatus -value deleted
  
  Cheers
  Marcel
  
Baltazar says:

06/12/2013 at 20:58

Nice tip! 🙂

Is there a way to restore a list of CIs with pending delete using the script?

Not all of them, just a list.

Thank!

Andre Prins says:

23/01/2015 at 17:15

Thanks,
for 2012 R2 the script needs a bit of tweaking, but your script gave the right direction, so it was not too hard :

$class = Get-SCSMClass | where{$_.name -match “system.configitem”}
$deletedobjects = Get-SCSMClassInstance -class $class| where {$_.objectstatus -match “pending”}
$deletedobjects | %{ $_.ObjectStatus = ”deleted” ; $_ } | update-SCClassinstance

Regards,
Andre

- Marcel Zehner says:
  
  09/02/2015 at 11:07
  
  Thanks Andre for sharing!
  
  Cheers
  Marcel