Maintain the Forwarder

Installing a forwarder is the short part of its life. These pages cover the rest of it.

Updating and upgrading. Newer forwarders collect more formats, carry fixes, and support features older builds do not, so running a current version is worth the rollout. The per-platform pages below cover the mechanics.

Removing. Uninstalling is not simply running the installer backwards. It needs a maintenance token, which is environment-scoped and expires after 14 days, and the machine's asset record and file history survive the removal by design. Uninstalling a forwarder does not erase what it collected.

Duplicates. A machine that has been reimaged, cloned from a template, or installed twice can end up reporting as two assets or fighting with itself. That has its own page.

Which of these do I actually need?

If you are rolling out to a group rather than a machine, Update the Forwarders in a Group does it centrally and is almost always the right tool at fleet scale. The per-platform pages here are for the single machine, the exception, and the case where the central path did not work.

If a forwarder is present but not reporting, this is the wrong section. Start at What to Check First.

If you want a machine to stop reporting temporarily rather than permanently, do not uninstall. See Sleep and Wake Forwarders, which keeps the asset and its history intact and is reversible in about fifteen minutes.

What should I read next?

• Forwarder Downloads, for the current version on each platform.
• Asset Identifiers, for the maintenance token these procedures need.
• Archive Inactive Assets, for tidying the fleet list after machines are retired.