Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Col...