Glossary
Agent Decommissioning
The controlled process of safely retiring an agent from active service, including data archival, notification to consumers, and cleanup of integrations.
What is Agent Decommissioning?
Proper decommissioning prevents abrupt service interruptions, ensures data preservation for compliance, transfers responsibilities to replacement agents, and revokes credentials to prevent unauthorized reactivation. Steps include notification to dependent systems, transaction history archival, graceful shutdown periods, and formal deregistration.
Poor decommissioning can leave orphaned integrations, lost audit trails, or security vulnerabilities from abandoned credentials. Decommissioning plans should be prepared during deployment, not improvised at retirement.
Example
When retiring a customer service agent, the operator announces a 90-day deprecation, migrates traffic to a replacement, exports conversation history for archival, revokes API credentials, and formally deregisters the agent from Signet.
How Signet addresses this
Signet maintains decommissioned agent records for audit purposes while marking them inactive. Historical transaction data remains accessible for compliance even after decommissioning.
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