What is a "managed computer"?

There is a group called Managed Computers which gets populated via your discovery scans.  Once its detected via discovery you can then "manage" it with patch manager. 

The WMI provider is now called client components.  I distribute it by group policy but im sure there are other ways to get them installed.  It will show up in add/remove programs if its installed

Thank you.  That helps tremendously.  I do see "SolarWinds Client Components" installed on most of my computers in my publishing environment. I haven't checked to see if they all have it.  What is odd is that I don't recall what I did that caused it to get installed everywhere.  Does anyone know what the official steps are for deploying this component (a link to instructions is fine).

Secondly, does anyone know if PM can review all your computers and tell you if those components are missing from a computer?

Patch Manager installs SolarWinds Client components - SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. Help and Support

It looks like it does it automatically for you.  Its been a long time since Ive set things up and im pretty sure mine is GPO along with my third party self signed certificate but I also remember having these go out through windows update, especially when we upgraded from patch manager 1.85 to 2.1.

To see what its installed on or not im sure there is a report that could be created, or you could just go to All Updates, select Status: Any, and then text filter for solarwinds (or just scroll and find it).  You have some info here for Computer Summary to see what the status is for them.

This thread is super old, but it popped up on my Thwack dashboard as having been updated.  I don't see the change, but since i'm here i'll comment a bit on this. 

The software formally known as SolarWinds WMI Provider (which as noted above will show up as SolarWinds Client Components when installed on a target machine now) will, by default get installed when you do a task that requires the WMI provider.  That could be any one of a number of different Tasks like Discovery, Inventory, or update deployment tasks (e.g. Update Management or Update Management Wizard).   So, normally there is not an extra action you have to take to get that WMI Provider to the target machines.

Notes:

• If you don't like the auto-deployment of that SolarWinds Client Components software, you can turn off that behavior by toggleing the setting for it under Patch Manager System Configuration -> Management Groups -> [select your Management Group name] -> SolarWinds -> Settings tab -> Automatically provision SolarWinds WMI Providers
• The WMI Provider software doesn't run as a service and does not initiate any communication on its own unless it is actively being used by a Task to do something to the target machine.
• The WMI Provider software is different than the optional Patch Manager Agent (which is typically only used when there is a firewall between the Patch Manager server(s) and the target machines.

When it comes to deployment of the WMI Provider, if you don't want to use the 'normal' automated way to get it out to machines, there are a couple of options:

• You could deploy the .MSI for it through Group Policy
• You could Publish the 3rd party application package that SolarWinds makes available into WSUS or SCCM and then use the traditional deployment method of that environment to deploy the update out to your machines
• You could manually install the .MSI to the target machines
• You could target a machine or Group of machines in the Patch Manager Console, and then right-click that selection to run a Task to deploy the WMI Provider directly; that task is called either Check and Manage Computer Connectivity or Check Computer Access, depending on from where you are initiating the Task

Another side note:

In the Patch Manager console, a lot of people see the folder/node thing called Managed Computers and think:  "ah! there are only a few things in there - but i have a bunch of machines i will be managing, so i need to do something to make them show up there!".   This is a perfectly logical assumption, but it is mostly incorrect.

As frgpugs​ alluded, it is the execution of some Task against a machine that will make it appear in Managed Computers.   It is not a requirement, however, for a machine to already be in Managed Computers for you to be able to target it with a Task.   So, in short, you can just go about your business of doing things to machines and they will just appear in Managed Computers once they have been targeted with something.  The only reason you would need to try to get them to appear there is if you like some of the information you can see about them in that particular view or if it just irritates you that a particular machine isn't there (since it can be an easy place to quickly find a machine for targeting with some task).  In that case, i'd recommend running an Inventory against all the machines that you want to be in Managed Computers...that would make it show there and also let you run reports on the collected Inventory if desired.