Network Device Health Check Services

What the health check covers

• Software currency — installed version against current and recommended releases, plus which published security advisories apply to the versions you are running.
• Lifecycle position — announced end-of-sale, end-of-support and end-of-software-maintenance dates for every device, so you know what is approaching a cliff edge and when.
• Support entitlement — which devices carry active vendor support, which have lapsed, and where the gaps sit relative to business criticality.
• Hardware condition — system alarms, environmental status, power supply and fan state, memory and storage headroom, and error counters that indicate a component heading toward failure.
• Capacity — CPU, memory, session and throughput utilisation against platform limits, and how much headroom remains for growth.
• Configuration quality — high-level review against vendor guidance covering management-plane exposure, logging, redundancy configuration and obvious hardening gaps.
• Redundancy verification — whether HA pairs, redundant links and protocol relationships that are supposed to provide resilience actually would, which is frequently where health checks find their most important results.
• Backup posture — whether current configurations are backed up anywhere, how recently, and whether a restore has ever been tested.

What you receive

The deliverable is a written report with a device-level inventory table and a prioritised action list. Each finding carries a risk rating, the recommended remediation, and an indication of effort so the actions can be planned against budget and maintenance-window availability rather than sitting as an undifferentiated list.

We separate findings into three groups: issues needing attention now because they represent active risk or imminent failure, issues to plan for in the next budget cycle such as approaching end-of-support, and observations worth knowing but not worth acting on immediately. The intention is that the report can go to a technology leader and be acted on directly, without needing an engineer to translate it first.

The health check is deliberately available as a standalone engagement. There is no obligation to take the remediation work with us, and a report that recommends nothing urgent is a legitimate and useful outcome.

When a health check earns its cost

• Before a budget cycle, when you need to justify refresh spend with evidence rather than assertion.
• After inheriting an estate — through acquisition, a change of managed service provider, or a team member's departure — where documentation is incomplete.
• Ahead of a planned upgrade programme, to establish scope and identify devices that will need special handling.
• Following an unexplained outage, where the underlying condition of the estate is now a live question.
• Ahead of an audit or certification, to know what will be found before someone else finds it.
• When performance complaints persist and nobody can say whether the cause is capacity, configuration or hardware condition.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a health check take?

For a typical mid-size estate of 20 to 50 devices, data collection runs two to three days and the report follows within a week. Larger or multi-site estates scale from there. Where read-only remote access can be arranged, much of the collection can be done without on-site presence.

Does the health check require changes to our devices?

No. Collection is read-only — configuration exports and show-command output. Nothing is modified. Where you prefer, your own team can run the collection commands and supply the output rather than granting us access.

Do you need administrative access?

Read-only access is sufficient and is what we normally request. For customers whose change control makes even read-only third-party access difficult, we provide the exact command set for your team to run, and work from the resulting output.

Is the health check vendor-specific?

No. Mixed estates are the normal case. The report covers whatever is installed — Cisco, Juniper, HPE Aruba, Fortinet, Palo Alto, Ruckus, Extreme, Arista and others — with findings presented consistently rather than as separate per-vendor reports.

Do we have to use you for the remediation?

No. The health check is a standalone deliverable and the report is yours. Many customers use it to inform their own roadmap or to scope work they will tender. We are happy to quote for the remediation, but the report is not written to manufacture a need for it.

Related services

• Network & Security Lifecycle Management
• EOL / EOS Management
• Network Device Firmware Upgrade
• Network Monitoring & NMS
• Request an Upgrade Assessment