Zoomed Image
USA
800 691 9120
UK
01225 704844

Asset Health

IT Asset Management Guide
Asset Inventory

Asset Health

The Asset Health feature highlights in-service assets that have one or more issues you may want to act on -- end-of-life operating systems, missing patches, low disk space, expired warranties, and so on. Each issue is recorded against the asset as a tag, so a single machine can carry several health issues at once. This page explains where to find the data, how each issue is determined, and how to tune or disable individual rules.

Where to Find It

There are three entry points:

  • "Assets with Health Issues" KPI tile on the Asset Inventory Dashboard. The number is the count of in-service IT assets that currently have at least one active health issue. Click the tile to drill into the Asset Health Issues query.
  • Asset Health tab on the Asset Inventory Dashboard. This tab presents the same data as a set of charts grouped by health issue.
  • Assets by Health Issue menu item (Asset Inventory menu category). Opens a tree view down the left grouped by issue, with the matching assets listed on the right.

The drill-down lists asset reference, description, the specific health issue, its category and severity, custodian, computer name, operating system, location and asset category.

What Counts as an Asset with Health Issues

The KPI tile and dashboard counts only include assets that meet all of the following:

  • The asset Status is flagged as In Service.
  • The asset Category has the context ITASSET (i.e. it is an IT asset, not a fixed asset, consumable, or contract).
  • At least one Health rule that is Enabled has flagged the asset.

Disposed, retired and non-IT assets are ignored, and any health rule that has its Enabled flag turned off in the Health lookup table is skipped both at calculation time and in the dashboard counts.

Health Issues and Their Criteria

The following table lists each health issue, the rule that determines it, and its category and default severity. Issues are grouped into two categories -- Security and Asset Health -- and each has a severity of Low, Medium, High or Critical.

# Issue Category Severity Criteria
1 No Disk Encryption Security Critical The asset has at least one physical disk and no disk has an encryption method recorded. Excludes assets in Category 4 (typically a non-applicable category).
2 OS End of Life Security Critical The asset's operating system has an EndOfLifeDate set on the OperatingSystem lookup, and that date is in the past.
3 Firewall Disabled Security High At least one row in the asset's firewall status detail has Enabled = 0.
4 Missing Windows Updates Security High Windows asset where DateOfLastWindowsUpdate is NULL, or is older than HealthMaxPatchAgeDays (default 30). The number of days since the last patch is stored as the metric value.
5 Not Domain Joined Security High The asset has a computer name but no domain, or the domain is WORKGROUP. The recorded domain (or None) is stored as the metric text.
6 Unsupported Software Security Medium Reserved -- rule defined in the Health lookup but the discovery rule for this issue is not currently active.
7 Banned Software Detected Security High One or more software products with ProductClass = Banned are installed and running on the asset. The metric value is the count of banned products and the metric text is the name of one of them.
8 Below Minimum Specification Asset Health Medium At least one of: CPU below LowSpecCPUSpeed MHz (default 1300), memory below LowSpecMemory KB (default 3,000,000 / ~3 GB), or total disk below LowSpecDiskSize MB (default 10,000 / 10 GB). The metric text describes the failing components.
9 Low Disk Space Asset Health High Free space on the Windows drive is less than HealthMinDiskSpacePercent (default 10%) of total drive size. The metric text shows free / total in GB.
10 Spindle Disk Drive Asset Health Medium The asset has a physical disk classified as HDD (mechanical), excluding virtual disks (model containing Virtual, QEMU or VBOX). The metric text shows the disk model.
11 Stale Discovery Asset Health Medium Reserved -- rule defined in the Health lookup but the discovery rule for this issue is not currently active.
12 Excessive Uptime Asset Health Medium LastBootUpTime is older than HealthMaxUptimeDays (default 60). The number of days of uptime is the metric value.
13 Warranty Expired Asset Health Low WarrantyEndDate is set and is in the past. The metric text shows the expiry date.
14 No Antivirus Security Critical A PC- or Server-class asset (by Category context) has no running antivirus service (Windows Defender, ESET, Sophos, Trend, McAfee VirusScan, eTrust, or any service whose name contains Antivirus) and no installed software with a Product Type Group of Antivirus.

Configurable Thresholds

The thresholds for the rules that have one are stored on the SpecialOption system table and can be edited by an administrator (Admin -> Special Options):

Code Default Used By
HealthMaxPatchAgeDays 30 Missing Windows Updates
HealthMaxUptimeDays 60 Excessive Uptime
HealthMinDiskSpacePercent 10 Low Disk Space
LowSpecCPUSpeed 1300 (MHz) Below Minimum Specification
LowSpecMemory 3,000,000 (KB) Below Minimum Specification
LowSpecDiskSize 10,000 (MB) Below Minimum Specification

After changing a value the new threshold is applied on the next discovery load (see below) -- existing flags are not retroactively re-evaluated until then.

Disabling a Health Rule

Each row in the Health lookup table has an Enabled flag. Setting it to No removes the issue from the dashboard counts and from the drill-down query, and prevents new rows being raised against that issue. Existing tags remain on the asset detail history but are filtered out of the live views.

To edit the lookup, open Admin -> Lookup Lists -> Health, or edit the Health lookup directly via the standard lookup-management UI.

How the Tags Are Maintained

Health flags are not calculated on demand -- they are refreshed as part of the discovery load pipeline. The master transform Load 910 - Health runs after each discovery load and:

  1. Prepares a temporary results table.
  2. Runs each enabled health rule (sub-transforms Sub Load 910 110 through Sub Load 910 270), inserting one row per (asset, issue) combination that currently fails the rule, along with an optional metric value (numeric) and metric text (free text).
  3. Reconciles the results into the AssetDetailHealth table:
    • rows for assets that no longer fail the rule have their UsageFlag cleared (the issue stops appearing on the asset);
    • rows for assets that still fail the rule are updated with the latest metric value, metric text and last-seen date;
    • new (asset, issue) combinations are inserted with the discovery date as their first-seen date.

This means health data is as current as the most recent discovery load for each asset -- assets that have not been discovered recently keep their last-known health state until the next load.