Cairn

What changed

Changes to Cairn, month by month. Anything that changed what an existing number means is at the top of its month, because that is the part worth reading.

  1. September 2026

    Changed what your numbers mean
    • What changed now separates what changed in your estate from what changed in what we can see. When a connection is added, ended or refused, the devices it brings or takes with it are reported as a change in our view, naming the source and the date, and no longer as devices that arrived in or left your estate. The estate figures may be smaller as a result.
    • Devices known only through a connection that has since ended are no longer counted as current anywhere. They are listed as last reported by that source, on its own date, and every count that leaves them out says how many it left out.
    • Support judgments for Apple, Android and ChromeOS devices now say which release they were compared against and when we read it. Where a device reports a newer version than the one we hold, it is shown as support state unknown rather than judged against our older number.
    • Vendor end-of-support dates now show the same day wherever you read them. Some were showing the day before for readers west of Greenwich.
    • The counts on the tabs of your device list now respond to the filters you have applied. They previously answered a narrower question than the list underneath them — a search and the tab you were on, and nothing else — so if you arrived from a link in your monthly report, or filtered to unencrypted machines, the tab said one number and the list showed another. Both were honest counts of different groups. They are now counts of the same group, which means some tab figures will look smaller than you remember when a filter is on.
    • The paragraph explaining why your device tabs do not add up now says which total it is quoting. It read "924 of these rows are machines" while showing a tab of 481, and the 924 was a total across every tab rather than a count of what was on screen — a number you could not find, in the sentence that exists to explain the other numbers.
    • We corrected how we read the Windows edition of each device. Editions have different support windows, and we had been assuming the shorter one everywhere — so support dates changed for 194 devices at one client, and the number of devices ending support within six months fell from 194 to 63.
    • We changed how "behind on updates" is measured. It used to compare every machine against the single most advanced one in your estate, so one laptop taking an update early made everything else look behind. It now compares against the build the largest group of your machines is on, which moved one client from 437 devices reported behind to 349.
    • Your asset register check no longer counts things nothing could ever have found. A printer or a UPS is not missing — no system we connect to reports one — so those entries are listed in their own group rather than among the hardware that is genuinely unaccounted for. The "never seen on the network" figure is smaller as a result, and more of what is left is worth acting on.
    • Devices watched by a monitoring system no longer show an operating system they never reported. The monitoring group they belong to was appearing in that column, so a group of access points read as a platform somebody could patch.
    New and improved
    • What you sign in to now has a name of its own: **Cairn**, made by RVA Tech Visions. Both appear where they belong — the tool names itself on the page you are reading, and the company stands behind what it says. Nothing about your data, your address or your sign-in has changed.
    • Moving around your device list no longer loses your place. Applying a search used to send you back to the first tab, and changing tab used to discard the search and every filter with it. Both now carry what you had applied.
    • A device that has not been heard from in months no longer reports a restart date as though it were current. Where the newest evidence behind a finding is older than the period it covers, the row says so rather than stating it as a present-tense fact.
    • The navigation scrolls on a shorter screen. The last items sat behind the footer on a smaller laptop and could not be reached.
    • Money figures no longer depend on the machine that rendered them. The format is stated explicitly, so a total reads the same wherever it is produced.
    • There is now an Assessment page, showing what we have found in your directory and, where you run one, in your Active Directory domain. Each line says what was looked at, how many it found, when it was collected and which system it came from.
    • A check that could not be answered says so, and says why, instead of reading as a clean result. Where a missing permission stopped us looking at something, that is what you will see — not a zero.
    • Assessments are kept rather than replaced, so next time there is something to compare against and you can see what you have fixed.
    • The Active Directory assessment can now be sent to Cairn by the script that produces it, or uploaded by hand from the same page. Sending is optional and the file is always written first, so a domain controller with no internet access loses nothing.
    • A new Security page describes how Cairn handles your data, including the parts that are weaker than the rest. It is readable without signing in, so anyone who needs to review it before you connect anything can.
    • The coverage page now asks what reaches your machines rather than whether one particular tool does. Every system that can report on an endpoint gets a line, measured against the same total, and a system you have not connected says so instead of reading as nought per cent.
    • Records your directory holds that nothing has ever reported are now listed separately from machines that are simply unmanaged. They are usually hardware that was replaced without the old registration being removed, and they are the only thing on your report that will not clear itself.
    • Meraki hardware now links straight through to its own page in the Meraki dashboard, so a switch or camera you are looking at here is one click from the console that can do something about it.
    • Network hardware your console cannot reach now says so in those words, rather than being reported as down. A switch behind a firewall that has stopped allowing cloud communication is still carrying your traffic, and the date it was last heard from is beside it.
    • The coverage page now answers everything it can from Microsoft alone, instead of waiting for a monitoring system to be connected before showing you anything.
    • Each tab of the Integrations page now shows only what that kind of connection reads. A system that reads two things — your devices and your tickets, say — has a card under each, and the one that connects it links to the other. The Cairn appliance itself is now under Network Discovery, with what it may read in your directory listed under Identity.
    • The Cairn appliance’s card now lists every other connection it carries reads for, from what you have configured, and says so plainly when it carries none — so everything a box on your network does is in one place.
    • Everything Cairn writes for you is now in American English throughout.

Drawn by Cairn on 2026-10-24 at 20:09 UTC.