nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials
Store

Reporting and Inventory Help

achowsy

Hi,

Can someone advice me how can I setup to give me a daily report for Microsoft patches and a report for 3rd party patches?

Does this mean I have to do an "Wsus inventory" on the clients or I have to do an inventory for all the clients?

I would like to generate a report that tells me how many computers are not fully patched and a list of patches that each computer is missing. This can be a excel format or a html format.

Currently we have a WSUS/patch manager APP/AUTO/MGR server in Singapore. It is also the upstream WSUS server. The other WSUS servers are all downstream WSUS servers/Patch Manager Automation servers in other countries.[If anyone knows how many downstream WSUS servers i can have for 1 upstream WSUS, please let me know]

Can you also advice me whether I need to do a rollup from the Singapore WSUS/Patch Manager server? The Extention Pack can connect to the other downstream WSUS servers and I have schedule a "WSUS inventory" every day for each server.

Thanks.

adrian

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

LGarvin

To use the reporting system in Patch Manager does require the creation of an inventory task.

There are two types of inventory tasks:

WSUS Inventory -- captures information from the WSUS server about updates, approvals, computers, groups, and update status on those computers.
Managed Computer Inventory -- captures information from the client systems about hardware, software, and other system configuration aspects.

The WSUS Inventory talks only to the WSUS server and does so using the WSUS API -- just like a console does.

The Managed Computer Inventory uses WMI and requires RPC/WMI to be accessible on the target systems, and requires the Patch Manager WMI Providers to be installed on the client systems.

You can get some of the Managed Computer Inventory information via WSUS by enabling the Extended Inventory Collection option for the WSUS server. This will trigger the WUAgent to report inventory data to the WSUS server (so the WSUS database will be larger), and Patch Manager can then inventory this data via the WSUS Inventory -- eliminating the need to connect directly to the client systems.

Once you have the WSUS Inventory completed, the Computer Update Status report (found in the Windows Server Update Services Analytics report category) will provide you the information you need to identify machines that are missing patches and the patches that are missing.

A WSUS Inventory task can be created on any Application Server and targeted to any WSUS server. An appropriate administrator credential is necessary to authenticate the inventory task connection to the WSUS server. The data retrieved from the WSUS Inventory is stored in the Management Server. In an organization with multiple application servers and/or geographically distributed console users, it is very important to ensure that only *one* WSUS Inventory is configured per Management Server. Generally the WSUS Inventory task is created when the Management Server is first deployed, so the inventory data you need for reporting may already be available.

There is no specified number of downstream WSUS servers that can be supported by a single upstream server -- but there is a practical limit. Considering data throughput, especially across slower WAN connections, there's a certain time factor involved in how long it takes a downstream servers to synchronize and transfer files via BITS. Assuming the upstream server supports NO client systems, but just services downstream servers, it's a question of how many servers can successfully synchronize in a 24-hour period. If the upstream server also has clients to provide updates to, then you need to consider the total number of systems (clients + downstream servers) that are being serviced by the upstream server.

Reporting rollup is almost always something that should be enabled in a replica server environment -- unless the reporting requirements are fully distributed, and the central server administrators do not care about the patch status of downstream environments.

You can get more details about inventory and reporting from the Administration Guide in Chapter 6, and the Knowledge Base.

All comments

LGarvin

To use the reporting system in Patch Manager does require the creation of an inventory task.

There are two types of inventory tasks:

WSUS Inventory -- captures information from the WSUS server about updates, approvals, computers, groups, and update status on those computers.
Managed Computer Inventory -- captures information from the client systems about hardware, software, and other system configuration aspects.

The WSUS Inventory talks only to the WSUS server and does so using the WSUS API -- just like a console does.

The Managed Computer Inventory uses WMI and requires RPC/WMI to be accessible on the target systems, and requires the Patch Manager WMI Providers to be installed on the client systems.

You can get more details about inventory and reporting from the Administration Guide in Chapter 6, and the Knowledge Base.

achowsy

Lawrence,

Thanks for this. I know this has been 3 years ago but I hope you still get this and able to respond.

I managed to enable the "Extended Inventory Collection" option for the downstream WSUS server (for this example call it ServerA) and then ran a "WSUS inventory" on it with the option "direct or all" = ALL.

After the "WSUS inventory" task , I created a report using the datasource = "Update Services Computer Programs and Features" but I am getting a blank report.

On the SQL DB end, I checked the dbo.dt_wsus_inventory_WsusInternal_ARP in the Eminentware DB, and it is empty.

I suspect the "WSUS inventory" task did not collect those "Extended Inventory Collection" information.

Can you help guide me how to troubleshoot the "WSUS inventory" process so that the extended inventory data is able to get into the Patch manager DB? (I ran a query on the SUSdb on the ServerA and confirm that the software inventory of the clients were found in the ServerA SUSdb database).

Just to put this in context, ServerA is the downstream server of the Main Patch Manager server.

Thanks,

adrian

frgpugs

You may want to ask Solarwinds tech support. Unfortunately Lawrence passed away so will not be able to help with this.