Announcing General Availability of Patch Manager v2.1 - Automated 3rd Party Patches & More!

[colby]

The Patch Manager team is pleased to announce general availability of Patch Manager version 2.1. All customers under active maintenance can find the download in the SolarWinds Customer Portal, and anyone interested in Patch Manager can download from solarwinds.com.

We talked about what's new in detail back in the beta days (Patch Manager 2.1 Beta 1) , but let me quickly refresh your memory.

Automated Third Party Patches

We've added the ability to automatically publish and patch third party updates similar to the way WSUS/SCCM handle Windows updates. With this feature, you can automatically download, publish, and patch third party products from our 3PUP catalog (see: Table of third party patches - updated 4/8/2015‌ for the latest third party patches).

Important note: there are some providers that don't allow us to automatically download and publish their updates without a click-through EULA acceptance. For now, these providers (including Oracle and Adobe patches) won't be supported through this feature. Hopefully we'll find a good solution to this in the near future - we're working with the third party vendors directly to hopefully find some options.

New Reports

Thanks to thwack feedback and discussions, we've pulled in a lot of common custom report requests and now have them included out of the box! These reports should make it easier to identify problem systems and report on updates.

Included are:

• Custom Hardware Report
• Installed Programs and Features Basic
• Approved Updates Status Count by WSUS Server and Update Source
• Computer Update Status - Locally Published Updates
• Computer Update Status with Aggregate Counts of Install State for Approved Updates
• Computer Update Status Counts by Classification for Approved - Not Installed
• Computer Update Status - Approved Updates with ID and Revision

New Computer Group Scoping Options

A common request is to make it easier to find and manage computers across subnets, Active Directory OUs, or AD sites. We've added several new grouping options:

• IP subnet or range
• Active Directory Organizational Unit (OU)
• Active Directory Site

...and more!

In addition to the standard bugfixes and improvements, we've also:

• Made it easier to gather logs for troubleshooting with the support team
• and, added support for Windows 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 as options when selecting computer properties

As always come over to the Patch Manager‌ space here on thwack if you've got any questions. Happy patching!

[solaral]

Does the auto publish and patch of third party updates still requires to be Approve so that individual machines receive the updates?

Can the updates also be Decline?

If the new version 2.1 does not work well within our environment, is it easily for us to fall back to previous version? How?

[dkunkle84]

I'm looking for some kind of upgrade guide/notes about upgrading to the latest version from 2.0.2207.2

[jkassel]

If this only supported Linux and Solaris Patching, it would make my day.

[andrewm.]

I like the auto-publish feature, but it needs to provide finer control over the updates that will be auto-published before it will be useful in my production environment. We also need updated documentation to indicate how to use it properly.

For example, the Google catalog includes several types of update packages with each new version release: There are EXE packages and MSI packages, and each includes an install package or an upgrade-only package. We use the MSI package and only want to update clients that have an earlier version installed, but the auto-publish feature appears to publish every new update in the catalog. There doesn't appear to be any way to limit the updates that will be published within a catalog.

The release notes indicate that 3rd party updates can also be auto-approved but I can find nowhere to configure this.

Finally, there doesn't seem to be any reference to this new feature or how to use it in the documentation included with the 2.1 update, which appears to be the 2.0 R1 documentation from 1/23/2014.

[aileen.delara]

Cool stuff!