What is a device health grade?
A health grade is a recorded judgement of what condition a machine is in, held on the device record and filterable across the register. Grades run from excellent downwards. Health sits apart from status, so a device can be graded poor and still be marked ready for someone to use.
Condition and availability are different questions, and collapsing them costs a company money.
A machine three years old with a tired battery still works. Marking it out of service wastes it. Handing it to a new starter with no note wastes their first week.
The grade solves that by being a separate field. Status answers whether a device is in service. Health answers how well it is holding up.
Read together, the two produce a replacement plan without anybody building a spreadsheet. Ready plus a low grade is the queue worth funding next.
The grade is a person's judgement, recorded after looking at the machine. That keeps it quick to set and easy to update.
So the value is in consistency rather than precision. A company that grades on the same basis each time gets a comparable picture. One where three people grade by different instincts gets noise with a tidy label on it.
Specification fields carry the objective half. Processor, memory, storage, screen size and generation are facts about the machine, and filtering on those sits well beside the grade.
A grade is as fresh as the last check. Pairing a re-grade with the verification round keeps both fields current in one pass.
Agree what each grade means in one sentence before anybody uses them. Writing that down in the equipment policy is the cheapest way to keep three people's judgements comparable.
Related questions
Is the grade calculated from the specification?
No. Specification and health are separate fields. A high specification machine in poor condition keeps both facts on the same row.
What is the difference between health and status?
Status is operational: ready, under maintenance or retired. Health is condition. A ready machine can carry a low grade, and often does.
Can I report the health of a device I hold?
Raise it through the IT and Equipment category on the support desk. Editing the register itself needs the device permissions.