End-of-Life Monitoring
NetCrunch tracks when the operating systems it monitors stop being supported, alerts a chosen number of months ahead, and shows the state of every Windows and ESXi host in one grid.
An unsupported operating system stops receiving security patches while continuing to work perfectly, which is precisely what makes it dangerous: nothing fails, nothing alerts, and the machine quietly becomes the weakest thing on the network. NetCrunch already knows which version every monitored host runs — end-of-life monitoring turns that into a date, and the date into an alert raised early enough to plan around.
This covers Windows and ESXi — the two platforms NetCrunch resolves lifecycle dates for. Other operating systems are monitored, but no support dates are looked up for them.
Where the Dates Come From
NetCrunch resolves versions against the public endoflife.date database, refreshing at most once every 24 hours and keeping a local copy so the information survives a restart or a lost connection.
Windows and Windows Server are matched by build number rather than by name, so a host reports against the servicing branch it is actually running rather than the family it belongs to. Other products are matched by version.
eol-offline
Servers Without Internet Access
The lookup needs outbound HTTPS to endoflife.date. Where the server cannot reach it, NetCrunch reads lifecycle data from an eol.json file instead — one shipped alongside the program, and one in the server's data folder that the online lookup keeps up to date.
Where both exist, the newer of the two wins, and entries from the data folder are merged over the shipped set. An isolated installation can therefore be kept current by replacing that file, rather than by opening a hole in the firewall.
Two Dates, Not One
Windows distinguishes two ends, and NetCrunch tracks both:
- Active Support
- Mainstream support. Feature updates and general fixes stop here.
- Security Support
- Extended security updates. This is the date that matters for risk — after it, no patches of any kind arrive.
ESXi has a single Support date.
The distinction is worth keeping in view when setting alerts. A host past active support is a planning problem; a host past security support is an exposure.
Seeing the Current State
Monitors Windows and Monitors ESXi
The monitor grids carry the support columns — Active Support and Security Support for Windows, Support for ESXi — each showing how long is left, or how long ago it ran out, as a relative time. Sorting on those columns lists the estate by how close it is to the edge, which is the view to bring to a budget conversation.
Alerting Ahead of Time
End-of-life alerts are ordinary alerts on the Windows and ESXi monitors, so they carry the usual actions, notifications and restrictions.
Each rule chooses two things:
- whether it watches active support or security support
- whether it fires when the date has passed, or a number of months before it — three by default
A rule can also say when it should close: never, when support has actually ended, or a smaller number of months before the date. The default — fire at three months and stay open — is the right shape for something that will not resolve itself.
Set the lead time to match your replacement cycle rather than to the default. Three months is enough to raise a purchase order and too little to plan a fleet migration. For an estate that needs budgeting a year ahead, an alert at twelve months is the one that changes the outcome.
The alert carries the date itself, whether it has already passed, the number of months remaining, and which of the two support types it refers to — so a notification says what to do without anyone opening the console.
eol-override
Overriding a Date
Sometimes the looked-up date is not your date. An extended support contract, a vendor-specific build, or an internal policy that retires hardware earlier than its vendor does — all produce a real date that a public database cannot know.
A custom end-of-life date can be set on an individual monitor, and where one is set it replaces the looked-up value everywhere: in the grid columns and in the alerting.
An override is per monitor, and nothing recalculates it. If you set a date under an extended support contract, it stays exactly as entered when the contract changes — so revisit overrides when the arrangement behind them does.
- NetCrunch as an Inventory Database
NetCrunch is an inventory database as well as a monitoring system. Everything it monitors, it also records — hardware, installed software, hotfixes and your own asset data — and because it keeps looking, it tells you when any of it changes.
- Operating System Monitoring
Read about monitoring Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and ESXi systems.
- VMware Monitoring
See how to monitor virtual machines, datastores, hardware status, and the performance counters of host and guest VMs.
- Windows Configuration - Hardware, Software, Hotfixes
The sensor allows monitoring of the hardware configuration of Windows machines using WMI.
- Monitoring Packs
NetCrunch Monitoring Packs allow efficient management of monitoring settings. You can use them to create monitoring policies by setting node filters. They can also be assigned manually to the node (or multiple nodes using multiselection). Currently, the program includes more than 270 ready-to-use Monitoring Packs for monitoring devices, applications, and operating systems.