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Patch Tuesdays

Hello,

I am wondering how everyone here deals with their patch tuesdays (assuming windows servers are being used). I am pretty new to solarwinds as a convert from system center operations manager i had a way to put all of the agents into maintenance mode when a server rebooted because of patches taking place. It is hard to put servers into unmanaged mode for a specific time frame in my enviroment because patch tuesday is what says patches are ready, we have group policies that say when servers should be rebooted after patches have been applied. I am just wondering how others here have dealt with this issue.

Cheers,

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mattoz

Unfortunately my scenario won't help you. We have a monthly maintenance window for patching, so all timeframes are known; despite that, our mgmt chose to keep things managed and let the email alerts fly. We don't have any uptime SLAs, so it doesn't really matter, other than having a lot of email in my SolarWinds folders the next day.

Do you work with the GPOs which control the updates installation and reboot timing? If not, I suggest you find out what the settings are. You may be able to coordinate the timing. For example, if the policy sets the installation deadline at 5 AM, you could set the un-managed period from 5 AM to 6 AM. Something like that.

BTW, watch for some new update settings in 2012/R2. Probably everyone else already knew this, but we just found out a couple weeks ago, when 2 of our prod servers rebooted during the week following our maintenance window (which is Sunday AM). Turns out someone had disconnected from them without logging off, and the new default behavior is not to force the reboot if someone is logged on (as if this is a desktop!). You can change the behavior back if you want: Enabling a more predictable Windows Update experience for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 (KB 2885694) - WSUS Product …

vinay.by

Might not be a completely automated setup for your requirement , but then you can use the below suggestion:

You can use unmanage scheduling utility available on your primary poller (All Programs -> Solarwinds Orion -> Advanced Features - > Unmanage scheduling utility)

Add the servers that needs to be unmanaged using the above utility , this would create a .cmd file. If schedule is known you can add this onto task scheduler on primary poller or in your case you can just double click on the cmd file to initiate unmanage when you require the same.