During a quarterly energy-use audit, a systems administrator finds three 8-year-old rack servers still powered on even though their data and roles were migrated to new hardware six months earlier. The units' vendor support contracts expired last year, and the organization has been paying for additional cooling and power without realizing it. Which of the following asset-management practices would have MOST likely alerted the IT team before the unnecessary cost and compliance risk accumulated?
Configure all migrated services to use Dynamic DNS records instead of static host entries.
Enforce a host-naming scheme that incorporates the vendor serial number of each physical server.
Maintain a centralized CMDB or inventory that logs warranty and end-of-life dates and sends automated reminders as they approach.
Apply power-capping limits through each server's baseboard management controller to reduce idle consumption.
A properly maintained inventory or configuration management database (CMDB) that stores each server's purchase date, warranty and support expiration, and planned retirement (EOL/EOS) can generate automatic reminders long before coverage lapses or scheduled decommission dates are missed. Those notifications would have prompted staff either to extend support or to shut the servers down after migration, preventing wasted power and an expired-warranty compliance gap.
Deriving hostnames from serial numbers simplifies naming conventions but does not track lifecycle milestones. Power-capping policies lower electricity usage only while the server remains in service; they do not highlight that a device should already be retired. Dynamic DNS records relate to name resolution for active services, not to hardware lifecycle tracking.
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