Hello,
I have noticed that on several occasion some of my devices have had certain attibutes cleared/deleted. ( Not Tags ) . I do not have any workflows that would overwrite or set new values to those attributes. Any ideas as to why that would happen ?
When you say “certain attributes cleared/deleted”, do you mean that the attribute has been removed from the device configuration? As in it’s no longer defined on the device?
Things that can cause that:
- Removing the attribute in the user interface on the device detail page
- A bulk device update with an operation that affects attributes
- An API request against the Device: Patch, Devices: Patch (bulk update), or Device Attribute: Delete endpoints, authenticated with a user token, application API token, or as a device
- A workflow invoking a Device: Update Node or a Losant API Node that uses one of the methods described above
- An application import that matches a device by name and overwrites the device configuration
Or do you mean that data reported for that attribute is being cleared? Values can be cleared by …
- Overwriting previous device state
- Deleting device data
- Old data being removed due to TTL settings on the organization
Dylan
The attributes themselves remain, but the values are cleared.
None of those scenerios are present on my end:
In that case can you provide more details about where you’ve seen this occur?
- Device ID
- Attribute(s) whose value disappeared
- The timestamp, approximately, of the value that has disappeared
Dylan
Looks like they got erased outside the 180 day window so I cant see when it happened, only the date I re-set them to what should have been default. I’ll watch for to happen again and loop back with some better details.
Dylan,
It happened again Friday.
674dc4bd3f94e1826f2da43f
Attributes:
Diameter, Height,high_band,low_band,Radius,Specific_Gravity all cleared around 800 AM MST May 30,2025
Those attributes are all “read only’” are set once when the device is comissioned so there are no workflows amending them.
Stew
Hey @Stewart_McCallum,
It looks like they were cleared due to data retention. That device was created exactly 6 months ago and your data retention is set to 6 months. If those values are only set once when the device is created, they would be cleared today.
So changing them to device tags should solve this ?
Stew
Yes, tags are persistent. If these are static values set when the device is created, tags would be the recommended place to store them.