End of support, on every report
Whether an operating system, an application or a runtime such as .NET or Node.js still gets security fixes now comes from a catalogue updated every day, and every PDF report says it: an EOL badge beside each affected machine, and a section that says what ended, when, and what runs until when.
A machine running something its vendor no longer fixes is usually the first thing an MSP wants to put in front of a client, because it is not a setting to change. It is a replacement, and a replacement is a line in a budget. Wegweiser already found these machines for the security briefing. From today the reports say it too, and the dates behind it stay current on their own.
Dates that keep themselves current
Until now, the date each operating system and application leaves support was typed into Wegweiser by hand. That works until the dates move, and they do: Debian 12's security support moved by a month, Windows Server 2016 and Exchange 2016 and 2019 gained paid extended-update programmes, and Ubuntu 26.04 was released before anybody had typed it in.
The dates now come from endoflife.date, which keeps them for nearly five hundred products and is read once a day. When something changes there, every machine is read again with the new date within the hour. The hand-kept dates remain as a fallback for the rare day the catalogue has nothing to say.
One detail matters more than it looks. Vendors do not agree on what "end of support" means. For Ubuntu it is the end of standard support, with paid Expanded Security Maintenance after it. For Debian it is the day the security team stops, with Long Term Support after it. Wegweiser reads each product's dates the way that product means them, so a Debian machine is not called supported for two years longer than its security team supports it.
On every report
- Device reports show an EOL badge beside the platform when something on the machine has left support, and a section that says what and since when.
- Group and client reports carry the badge in their machine tables, and a section listing each retired version with the machines still running it.
- The QBR carries the same section after the open findings, where a quarterly review plans replacements.
- The tenant report counts affected machines per client and names the clients each retired version reaches.
The badge says EOL when support has ended and EOL soon when it ends within six months. Where a paid extended programme still runs (Windows 10 ESU, SQL Server and Exchange extended updates), the report says so, and says it only applies where it was bought.
What is covered
Operating systems: Windows Server, macOS, and the major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat and its rebuilds, Fedora, openSUSE, Alpine, Mint). Windows 10 and 11 are judged as before. Applications: retired Office, SQL Server, Exchange and SharePoint versions.
And the runtimes and database servers MSPs find underneath business software: .NET, Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, each release on its own, because one machine often runs several. On Linux only builds from the vendor's own repository count, because a distribution's own packages are patched for as long as the distribution is supported: the Python that ships with Ubuntu 22.04 is fine until 22.04 is not.
The first read found .NET 5, 6 and 7 still installed on Windows machines, years past Microsoft's support, and a Node.js 18 from its vendor's repository. It also found .NET 8 and 9 on several machines. Both end on 10 November 2026, so any business software built on them needs .NET 10 before then, and the reports now say so six weeks ahead.