Keeping your Azure DevOps Agents clean: A guide to maintenance jobs

If you've ever managed self-hosted agents in Azure DevOps, you know how quickly disk space can vanish. Between build artifacts, source code, and temporary files, agents can become cluttered fast. That’s where maintenance jobs come in—a built-in feature designed to keep your agents tidy and your pipelines running smoothly.

What are Maintenance Jobs?

Maintenance jobs are automated tasks that run on your agents to clean up unused working directories and repositories. These jobs help:

Free up disk space by removing stale pipeline data
Improve agent performance and reliability
Reduce manual cleanup efforts

You can configure how often these jobs run and how many days of unused data to retain.

How do they work?

Maintenance jobs operate within agent pools. Each agent pool can be configured to run maintenance jobs on a schedule. These jobs target:

Working directories (e.g., C:\agent\work\{id})
Repository caches
Temporary build data

Azure DevOps tracks usage and cleans up directories that haven’t been touched in a defined period. This ensures that only relevant data sticks around.

How to configure a maintenance job?

Go to your Organization Settings when using Azure DevOps or Collection Settings when using Azure DevOps Server.
Click on Agent Pools and choose the desired pool from the list of available pools.

Go to Settings for the selected pool and set the Enable agent maintenance job toggle to enabled.

Configure your desired settings and choose Save.

Nice! I wished that I had known about this feature sooner…

Remark: You can track the maintenance job history for the current agent pool by going to the Maintenance History tab.

More information

Create and manage agent pools - Azure Pipelines | Microsoft Learn

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The art of simplicity

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