# Deleting Old Monitoring Indices
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-monitoring-indices/90987
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [June 27, 2017, 2:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-monitoring-indices/90987 "2017-06-27T14:55:05Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@crickes](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/crickes)
#### Post date: [June 27, 2017, 2:55pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-monitoring-indices/90987/1 "2017-06-27T14:55:05Z")
With reference to the following post:
> [@Delete Monitoring's old indices](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/delete-monitorings-old-indices/76328):
>
> Hi, Is there any smart way to delete old indices of Monitoring(Marvel)? Simply delete indices, using elasticsearch-curator or any other way? thanks
I've noticed today that my monitoring cluster (single node) isn't deleting any old indices. I haven't changed any of the default settings ad I now find myself with indices going back several months, and a very full disk. I need to delete them and get the automatic deletion working.
So what can prevent the automatic deletion mechanism from working? Is there anywhere I can check to see why they haven't been deleting automatically after 7 days? Does the cluster health have to be green for example? I only have a single node for the monitoring cluster and as I haven't tampered with the monitoring templates, it still tries to create replica shards and leave them unallocated. Is this why the indices aren't being cleared out after 7 days perhaps?
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### Author:  [@tanguy](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/tanguy)
#### Post date: [June 28, 2017, 9:14am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-monitoring-indices/90987/2 "2017-06-28T09:14:49Z")
Hi crickes,
The automatic deletion of old monitoring indices is available only for exporters of type `local` and the retention duration can be configured using the setting `xpack.monitoring.history.duration` if you have a non-basic license (see [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/x-pack/current/monitoring-settings.html#monitoring-collection-settings](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/x-pack/current/monitoring-settings.html#monitoring-collection-settings)).
This feature is not available when using `http` exporters, in this case you can use Curator.
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### Author:  [@crickes](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/crickes)
#### Post date: [June 28, 2017, 10:36am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-monitoring-indices/90987/3 "2017-06-28T10:36:52Z")
@tanguy Thanks for the clarification.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 26, 2017, 10:37am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/deleting-old-monitoring-indices/90987/4 "2017-07-26T10:37:01Z")
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