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Approving Windows Updates

justinr93 over 4 years ago

Hey everyone,

I'm very new to Patch Manager, and WSUS for that matter, so please pardon my ignorance. I'm tasked with learning these tools so I can take over the responsibility of updating and reporting on our companies computers. I've watched the learning videos, read countless threads, but for some reason I can't seem to figure out approving updates. I have a test machine that I've assigned to an "Alpha" test group so I can test simply running the updates. I must be missing some kind of resource somewhere that could assist in some very basics? I've tried approving critical and security updates (for my Alpha group only), and force them onto my test machine but for some reason it doesn't pull/install the updates I chose. I have no idea how it's choosing the updates, and of course, the end result is that it fails.

Current goal: is to fully update my test machine using Patch Manager so I'm comfortable moving into my "Beta" test group, which consists of about a dozen computer in my local office. Then, of course, push the updates out to the remainder of the company once I'm confident my local Beta group is running without issues.

Thanks in advance for the help!

0 micheal100 over 4 years ago

Ultimately it's worth understanding that Patch Manager relies on WSUS to do all the heavy lifting, essentially you can thing of SPM as just being in addition to (rather than replacing) WSUS.
In order to understand why updates aren't showing as needed (assuming they've been approved) it's worth looking at the approved updates table for that client machine in SPM.
Most frequently I'll see people misinterpret the status "not applicable" as being some kind of failure. What it really means is that the client evaluated the update, and it was actually shown to be not needed on that particular machine. This post goes into it in a bit more detail
https://thwack.solarwinds.com/t5/Archive-Blogs/How-the-Windows-Update-Agent-determines-the-status-of-an-update/ba-p/434686
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0 justinr93 over 4 years ago in reply to micheal100

Thanks for the reply! I don't seem to have persmission to view that article - I'll try again over the next few days, it likely has much to do with the migration.
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