How does Patch Manager work with SUPs in SCCM

Question

How does the information flow of 3rd party packaged updates change in an SCCM environment that relies on secondary servers configured as software update points?

From my understanding, normally, for Microsoft updates, the SUPs pull metadata from Microsoft directly, distribute it to their clients, and then those clients pull the update information from their DPs, where it has been replicated from the Primary server down through the SCCM infrastructure.

Does Patch Manager have to communicate directly with every software update point to push metadata?  Or can 1 Patch Manager server connected at the Primary site push 3rd party update metadata to the downstream SUPs and THEN go through the "normal" process I described above?

I don't have a live environment, I am just researching the product and haven't found a very clear answer in any of the existing documentation.

Thanks!

kellytice · Answer

When using WSUS, you would just publish the 3rd party updates to the upstream WSUS server and it will flow down to the downstream WSUS servers along with the Windows updates.

From my understanding, it is much the same in SCCM.  You can't publish to a downstream WSUS, so you would just publish the 3rd party updates to the 'upstream' SUP and it should flow down to the 'downstream' servers (DPs/SUPs/whatever those are called)