Why Do I Need to Know the Cisco EoL/EoS?

All network administrator knows this problem: How do I know when my Cisco equipment in my network is going End-of-Life (EoL) and when?

All products reach the end of their life cycle for several reasons, including market demands, technology innovation and development-driven changes, or product maturity and replacement with functionally richer technology.

Even so, Cisco also recognizes that end-of-life (EOL) milestones often prompt companies to review the impact of the Cisco products, services, or subscriptions in their networks.

Basically, you need to know EoL status for planning purposes. The EoL process usually has a few common stages, although specific details may depend on the type of product and vendor:

• End-of-Life Announcement — The vendor publishes an EoL schedule for a particular product (or product line).
• End-of-Sale Date — After this date, you will not be able to purchase additional units of the product.

 

For your critical production environment, you obviously cannot be using unsupported products. You need your equipment to use the most up-to-date firmware version, ability to get spare parts, or most importantly, have someone from technical support help you troubleshoot problems.

That is why you need to check regularly which devices are going end-of-life and plan appropriate replacement. The planning is important not only because of the technical aspects but also because of the budget. Imagine you have many pieces of certain hardware on your network and this hardware goes end-of-life; such replacement may require considerable investment.

 

How Can I find EoL Information?

 

Now we know why EoL information is important. The question is: How do I find it? There are two ways to accomplish this:

Let LogicVein do it for you

The easiest option is to let LogicVein do this for you using the Cisco Support APIs built into the system to fetch the information for you.

All you need is

1) a valid Cisco ID,

2) a valid Cisco Password and

3) an internet connection.

In a manner of minutes, your inventory is updated. You can now see the EoL/EoS of your devices, generate reports to show you the information, and,  create a job to continuously keep your system updated.

Manually do it yourself

If you do not have internet access to your system, you can always manage the EoL/EoS information yourself. When you try to do that, you will quickly find out that it is not so easy. Download data via a template, go to Cisco, get the information, then re-upload the template with the EoL/EoS filled in.

In closing

The LogicVein EoL/EoS tool is amazingly easy to use.  It will, in the long run, make your job, and life, easier.  If you would like to hear more, or see more, or learn more, contact your sales representative at sales@logicvein.com