How to identify Inactive Project on Azure Boards (ADO)?

Question

As the number of Projects increases under an organization, there might be performance issues with Azure Boards (ADO).

If there are hundreds of projects already created, how to identify inactive projects that are currently not in use, which can be archived.

Answer 1

Hello Prashant !

Thank you for posting on Microsoft Learn Q&A.

There’s no built-in inactive project flag in Azure DevOps and there still isn’t a first class archive project feature, so you have to infer inactivity from activity signals and then lock or delete/restore as policy.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73369803/archive-a-devops-project

You need to pick your inactivity window and pull last activity per project from multiple sources, then take the max of those timestamps:

• for boards, use the Analytics OData feed to query WorkItems by ChangedDate (last work-item change) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/report/extend-analytics/analytics-recipes?view=azure-devops
• for pipelines, use Analytics entities for pipelines or builds to get the last completed run per pipeline https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/report/analytics/entity-reference-pipelines?view=azure-devops
• for repos, use Git Pushes – List or OData if you already model it and take the latest push date and be aware of Git different date types, but ADO also tracks when a commit was first pushedhttps://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/azure/devops/git/pushes/list?view=azure-devops-rest-7.1

The project summary page only shows 1/7/30-day activity it can be useful for a quick analysis but not for longer windows. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/projects/project-vision-status?view=azure-devops

Then report projects whose max activity date is less than today window and make them private, remove the permissions ,lock repos and disable pipelines or delete the project.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/projects/delete-project?view=azure-devops