Microsoft has announced that support for Windows 10 will officially end on October 14, 2025. While that may seem distant, the timeline to assess, plan, and upgrade systems is already tight—especially for enterprises with large or complex environments.
Unsupported systems pose serious risks, from security vulnerabilities to compliance issues. The first step in any transition plan is to know what you have—and that’s where Device42 can help. With powerful discovery and dependency mapping tools, Device42 enables IT teams to quickly identify and prioritize Windows 10 machines across their entire infrastructure.
Windows 10 is primarily used for end user devices and may not be top of mind to your IT organization who is constantly tasked with updating, patching, and upgrading the core infrastructure services to your business. However, end user devices tend to be used for software development, can be mobile points of access, and tend to have deep levels of access depending on the role of the user. Because of this, it is critical to make sure these devices get updated (probably to Windows 11) before October 14.
How does Device42 help?
Device42 helps by discovering these devices in your environment. Not all discovery solutions have automated discovery or continuous discovery. Make sure that you have scans running across your network regularly with at least SNMP capabilities to detect all IP devices in the network and get some basic information about that device such as the OS version it’s running. NMAP could also be used to at least guess at the OS family. Device42 not only has SNMP and NMAP capabilities, but it allows you to go much deeper using login or agent-based scanning to also pick up installed software (for after you’ve solved all the EOL/EOS operating systems and are looking for a new challenge).
Now that you have the full inventory of devices, there are practical steps to manually add in End of Support (EoS) and End of Life (EoL) triggers into Device42 which can be found in this article. Device42’s “EnrichAI” is also continuing to add entries into the EoS/EoL auto enrichment. Through both modalities, the devices can now be reported and exported for action.
Don’t Panic
If you feel like you’re running out of time,are not sure where to begin, have no discovery, and have certainly not tagged EoS/EoL dates, here is a straightforward approach with Device42 to get things under control (and yes-you can adapt these steps for other tools too).
- Go to https://www.device42.com/try-device42/ and get the free demo account. It’s a limited number of licenses, but we’re taking advantage of the free feature in Step 2.
- In Device42 go to Discovery>Discovery Hub
- Run a blind scan against different parts of your network (this is using NMAP here, so that will need to be allowed in your network. This will give you a bucketized inventory based on what NMAP thinks is running in your environment.
- Click on the “discovery type” on this page, on the right, you can select “Windows” and the list will automatically filter to show only the relevant IPs.
- If you’re using Device42, set up a Windows scan to gather detailed information on each device and identify which ones need to be upgraded. If you’re not using Device42, you’ll need to manually review the list of IPs to assess upgrade needs.
- If you’re using Device42, let our reporting AI capabilities do the heavy lifting by ask it to find devices running Windows 10. It will generate the query and build the report for you. Here’s an example of how that works:
Let Device42 Get You Started
Windows 10 is still widely used across many IT environments, but with its EoS date fast approaching, it could quickly become a hidden risk.
Device42 makes it easy. With powerful discovery and automated tracking, you’ll know exactly where Windows 10 is running—and what needs attention before support ends.
Start your free trial today and find every Windows 10 instance in your environment—fast
