# Can I delete the kibana\_task\_manager indices
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/can-i-delete-the-kibana-task-manager-indices/225445
**Category:** Kibana
**Created:** [March 27, 2020, 4:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/can-i-delete-the-kibana-task-manager-indices/225445 "2020-03-27T16:46:56Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@dao](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dao)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2020, 4:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/can-i-delete-the-kibana-task-manager-indices/225445/1 "2020-03-27T16:46:57Z")
It is not clear on what those index are storing (can see some maps and lens related documents)
Is it possible to delete them to limit my shards? what would be the consequences?
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### Author:  [@flash1293](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/flash1293)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2020, 5:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/can-i-delete-the-kibana-task-manager-indices/225445/2 "2020-03-27T17:04:11Z")
Some background tasks in Kibana happen on a schedule, e.g. once a day. The component managing these tasks is called the task manager. It uses special indices in Elasticsearch to store the queue of tasks and some meta information. You can find more information here: [https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/23632](https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/23632)
If you are talking about multiple indices, are you referring to `.kibana_task_manager_1`, `.kibana_task_manager_2` and so on? If that's the case, those are generated when upgrading kibana - the `.kibana_task_manager` always points to the active one, so it's safe to delete the others.
Even if you are deleting the active index, Kibana will re-create it because it needs it to function internally.
To get rid of it, you could theoretically disable the task manager via `xpack.task_manager.enabled: false` - but will trigger a cascade of other plugins which also need to get disabled now because they rely on task manager.
I definitely recommend leaving it in place - like the `.kibana` index it's an essential part of Kibanas functionality.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [April 24, 2020, 5:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/can-i-delete-the-kibana-task-manager-indices/225445/3 "2020-04-24T17:04:14Z")
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