Manage Service Expirations

You should ensure that all of your services have a specific expiry date or are set never to expire, as appropriate. This allows you to avoid paying for unneeded services while ensuring that critical services are never decommissioned.

Services and templates can have the following expiry states:

• Never expires
• No expiry date set
• Not expired
• Expired
• Soon to expire
• Post expiry

Once you set the expiry date, you can:

• Instantly identify when a service is due to expire.
• Search based on expiry state (see Search Cloud Data).
• Run reports based on expiry state.

You can configure the tag compliance policy to carry out actions on services that have no expiry date set (for example, generate an alert for all services without expiry information).

You can control expired services with the Expiry policy (for example, you can automatically decommission expired services).

Set expiry information for existing services

1. Click the Infrastructure, Applications, or Storage tab.
2. Navigate to a service, then do one of the following
• Select a VM, then select Actions > Lifecycle Management > Set Expiry Date.
• For all other service types, right-click and choose Set Expiry Date.
3. In the Set Expiry Date dialog, click the calendar icon, select a date, and click OK.

   An expiry date set for a virtual service, application stack, or auto scaling group automatically applies to all of its children, overriding existing values. But you can always apply a different expiry date to a child VM if required.

Set expiry information for new services

You can set expiry information for new services in one of the following ways:

• Through a completion workflow, with a Set Expiry Date step (for information, see Built-in Commander workflow steps).
• When manually deploying a requested service, or when manually cloning a VM
• By adding the Expiry Date element to the service-level request form (for information, see Service Request Form Elements).
• Through the Default Attributes policy.
• By setting expiry information on the source template or image.

If multiple methods are configured, they're applied in the order specified above, with the first item in the list taking precedence. See also Order of Precedence for Metadata and Service Settings.

Show the number of remaining expiry extensions

When the expiry policy is configured to allow primary owners to extend the expiry date of a service, a maximum number of allowed extensions can be configured. Both Commander and Service Portal users can view the number of expiry extensions remaining on a service, if the property is set as a shown property.

1. Click the Infrastructure, Applications, or Storage tab.
2. Select a service in the tree or double-click the service in a table.
3. On the Details section, click  Add Properties.
4. In the Property Selection dialog, from the Lifecycle category, add the property Expiry Extensions Remaining to the Shown Properties, and click OK.

   If an expiry extension limit was set, the number of extensions remaining is displayed. If no extensions remain, the value is 0. If expiry extensions are not allowed, or no maximum was set, the value is blank.

Reset the number of expiry extensions remaining for a service

When the expiry policy is configured to allow primary owners to extend the expiry date of a service (for more information, see Configure Expiry Policies), a maximum number of allowed extensions can be configured. You can reset the count of expiry extensions used for a service, so that the primary owner can continue to extend the expiry date for this service.

1. Click the Infrastructure, Applications, or Storage tab.
2. Navigate to a service in the tree or in a table.
• For a VM, select the VM, then select Actions > Lifecycle Management > Set Expiry Date.
• For all other service types, select Actions > Set Expiry Date.
3. In the Set Expiry Date dialog, enable Reset Expiry Extension Count.
4. Click OK.