How to remove Old versions of Cortex Agent

Arman_Zaheri — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:45:02 GMT

Hello everyone,

We're facing issues upgrading older versions of the Cortex agent on Windows endpoints — particularly versions 7.x and in some cases 8.x. These agents fail to upgrade both automatically and manually.

Requesting a cleaner for each minor version and sharing the uninstall/disable password with IT support is not only time-consuming but also raises security concerns. Things become even more complicated when using the cleaner in safe mode, where there's often no network access — requiring us to hand over the password just to disable the agent.

Is there any streamlined or supported method to remove outdated Cortex agents more efficiently, without having to go through all of these manual steps?

Any suggestions or best practices are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Re: How to remove Old versions of Cortex Agent

eluis — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 09:32:10 GMT

Hi Arman_Zaheri,

First recommendation is to uninstall XDR agents from the XDR tenant console so you can do it in a bulk automated manner.
For the endpoints that are not accessible, the way to uninstall them is to ask TAC support for the Agent Cleaner and this is more like a manual way rebooting in safe mode, etc.. They will give you the instructions on how to uninstall together with the agent cleaner executable. Instead of using the global password you can create at the agent profile as per the operating system level and set a password for every profile and assign the target endpoints to that profiles. This last password setting by profiles is a recommended good practice from PANW.
Please check the doc link:
https://docs-cortex.paloaltonetworks.com/r/Cortex-XDR/Cortex-XDR-Documentation/Manage-agent-tokens
Additionally you have the Token creation (temporary token -you can select the maximum expiration 21 days- you can create per needs and give to your sysadmins, and rolling tokens too which are renewed automatically every 14 days by the tenant)
As a good practice PANW recommends to maintain your endpoints with XDR agents installed on a daily basis to prevent a kind of chaos of many agents not able to communicate with the tenant, which will cause more manual operations on the endpoints with XDR agents.
As a help to reconnect non-connected agents you can use the cytool reconnect force command to force the reconnection of lost agents.
Please check how to use the cytool command tool at:
https://docs-cortex.paloaltonetworks.com/r/Cortex-XDR/8.2/Cortex-XDR-Agent-Administrator-Guide/Cytool-for-Windows

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KR,

Luis

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How to remove Old versions of Cortex Agent

Re: How to remove Old versions of Cortex Agent