Do you know if your equipment is about to be at the end of its life? Do you know where to look that information up? Or do you rely on the emails that ruin your day with the announcements that some critical piece of infrastructure is going to be unsupported in a few months? You may have some kind of a monitoring tool that can give you information about these updates. Is that always accurate? Does it cost you additional money for the feature? Do you have it deployed in the right location for your operations teams to access?
What if you could build your own program to find out what devices are at their end of sale or end of support? What if the information you’re looking for was available in an API format and was easy to query? If I’m asking those questions you probably already know that such a resource does exist already. Brian Yaklin has done a great job writing a post about where to find the API and how to access it to query device information. He even gives you some great code snippets to get you started so you can authenticate properly. Check out an excerpt here:
End-of-life hardware and software in an environment can be a risk to any organization. A vendor who has declared a particular model of hardware or version of software is no longer going to permit you to RMA that hardware if it fails and they may decide to no longer create patches for software versions. This leaves you susceptible to hardware failures which you can’t easily replace, or dangerous security risks in software that is not getting patched.
Make sure you read his entire post to learn more and get started here: A Guide to Cisco Support API’s – Part 2 – EoX
