Smart tips for managing your Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrade with Axonius

Remember when the move to Windows 10 was a major milestone? Fast forward ten years later, and that same operating system has now officially reached end of support. 

Now, raise your hand if you’re one of the many teams that still have hundreds, thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of Windows 10 devices in your environment. You’re not alone; as of the official Windows 10 end of support date of October 14, there were still hundreds of millions of devices running Windows 10. 

Axonius gives you the clarity and control you need to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11. You may have already upgraded a portion of your fleet, and here’s how you can use Axonius to help manage the last mile of the upgrade, with the help of two new features: 

• Device Inventory Classification: Group devices based on identifiers like device type, lifecycle status, ownership, criticality, etc. 

• Windows Patch Tuesday Workspace: A dedicated workspace to track and manage patch and upgrade status for both client and server Windows devices. 

How to find and tag devices that are still running Windows 10 

Axonius continues to provide answers to the seemingly easy questions. You likely have 

a “source of truth” that will give you insight into how many of your endpoints are still running Windows 10, but is that number really the truth? Ask the same question across different teams, and you’ll get different answers. 

Here, we’ll take a look at a few different approaches to identify the right devices to update. 

Use Device Inventory Classification, Axonius Tags, and Queries

Efficiency is key when you’re managing devices at scale. Today, you may use a combination of Action Center and Tags to create groupings of devices based on specific identifiers. 

With Device Inventory Classification, Axonius provides you with out-of-the-box groupings of assets aligned to common identifiers like device type, OS family, device ownership, and more.  

Here, we can use the Device OS Family classification to quickly identify all our Windows devices. Then, using Axonius Tags, we’ll label the 700+ devices that require an OS update. You can save this query to use within the Action Center later. 

Windows 11 leaves some devices ineligible for upgrade. If you still have devices in your environment that do not support upgrading that you’d like to exclude or decommission, the query wizard can help to identify those devices for you, too. Here’s an example where we’re querying for devices with less than the required number of CPU cores required for the upgrade, filtering out virtual machines. 

Use the Windows Patch Tuesday Workspace

Workspaces offer use-case-driven experiences across the platform, with pre-configured views, dashboards, and actions tailored to key outcomes. We recently introduced the Windows Patch Tuesday Workspace, enabling customers to monitor the patch status of all Windows clients and servers. 

Using the pre-configured dashboards in our Windows Patch Tuesday Workspace, you can quickly identify active Windows client devices, then filter the clients that need to be upgraded, based on your Tags. 

Next, we need to take action to get these devices updated. 

How to update devices to Windows 11 using the Action Center 

There are a number of enforcements available in the Action Center to get your devices upgraded. Whether it's opening a service desk ticket, notifying your IT team, or sending notifications/update actions to your endpoint management solution, you have flexibility. 

Let’s take a look at a few options. 

Add devices to a collection in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager 

In this example, you will run an Enforcement Set on a group of Windows 10 devices that need to be upgraded. Here, you are adding these devices to a collection in Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM). In MECM, this collection is targeted with a policy to run the OS upgrade. 

Add devices to a software package in Tanium

In this example, you will run an Enforcement Set on a group of Windows 10 devices that need to be upgraded. Using the Action Center, you are specifying the software package ID in Tanium that controls the Windows 11 upgrade, with a deployment operation to install the referenced software package. 

Create a ticket in ServiceNow 

If your team typically does not directly manage OS upgrades through Axonius, you can also create tickets in downstream systems like ServiceNow. In this example, you are referencing the query with the group of Windows 10 devices that require an upgrade, and creating an incident in ServiceNow for your IT team to act on. 

Manage your Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrades with Axonius

Upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 doesn’t have to be a scramble. With features like   Device Inventory Classification and the Windows Patch Tuesday Workspace, teams can quickly pinpoint upgrade needs and take action at scale.

Want to see how Axonius can simplify your upgrade path? Request a demo and we’ll show you how we can help.