If you've removed a device from your dashboard and now want that same machine back — a reassigned laptop, a re-imaged workstation — the agent on it can't just reconnect on its own. Here's why, and what actually brings it back.
Removing a device from your dashboard marks it removed on the server. It doesn't touch the machine itself — if the agent is still installed and running, it keeps sending its normal heartbeats on schedule, with no idea anything changed. Every one of those heartbeats gets rejected until you tell the agent, locally, to stop being the removed device.
A removed device that's still running and getting rejected will trip a "device rejected" alert on
your account (with a cooldown, so a machine retrying every 30 seconds doesn't spam your inbox), and
the alert email tells you exactly what to do: run the agent with the --reset flag on
that machine, then reinstall it. It will register as a new device.
--reset actually does
--reset deletes one local file — the agent's cached identity — and exits. That's the
entire operation: no network call, no server-side change, no immediate effect on your dashboard.
The device still shows as removed until you run the agent again after this.
The agent decides its own identity in a fixed order: a command-line flag, then an environment variable, then whatever identity is cached locally from before, and only if none of those exist does it generate a fresh random ID. With the cache file gone, there's nothing cached to reuse, so the next run mints a genuinely new ID — one your account has never seen before. The server has no reason to treat it as the removed device; it registers exactly like a first-time install.
Removing a device never deletes its past scan data — it just marks the device removed. That old history stays attached to the old device ID. When the machine re-registers under a new ID, it starts a fresh history from zero. Reinstalling reconnects the machine, not its past record.
Your dashboard also offers a separate uninstall script, but that's for a different situation —
fully removing the agent from a machine you're decommissioning: it deregisters the device, stops
the service, and deletes every installed file. If you actually want this machine monitored again,
don't run that. --reset followed by a normal reinstall is everything you need.
If you're not sure why a device stopped reporting in the first place, start with why a device shows Offline, and what to check first — this article covers what to do once you've confirmed it was removed on purpose.