Asset End of Life (EOL)

  • 12 April 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 294 views

Userlevel 5
Badge +8

For management of inventory, how do you use the end of life (EOL) field in your operations?

I have enabled cloud discovery, in which assets are created and removed from the cloud but the record sits around in FreshService. I’m debating on just deleting the asset as it would never appear again, marking it EOL or just ignoring it (not best option).

It made me wonder how others are utilizing the EOL date field for assets.


2 replies

Userlevel 2
Badge +3

It will depend on the audit requirements of you implementation. FS, pharma, controlled environments, you probably need to keep records for  audit purposes. In my experience clients don’t tend to delete anything. We have added custom status’s of “Retired”, for config items no long in use.

 

Personally, for those “disposable” cloud asset that have a short half life, I would specify a different retention policy, 12 weeks of maybe in an interim Recycle Bin state and delete them after that. As they don’t persist over 5+ years, need depreciating, maintenance, etc. Otherwise you’re holding data for the sake of it. 

 

The Cloud would have long deleted any record of the config item and you may still have records!

Userlevel 3
Badge +2

We do a couple of things:

  1. When we prep an asset for disposal, we set it to custom status of “Retired”. We then send out in large chunks to our Asset Disposition provider. When we get reports back from them, we set to “Disposed”
  2. We set EOL to an agreed upon date for the assets. Windows PCs are 5 years from the date of purchase and Macs are 6 years from date of purchase.  We then use reports based on EOL to schedule machines for refresh.

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